Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter
twitter.com
twitter.com
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"@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology."
Looks like he found somebody to have the CEO title, while he keeps deciding the product strategy. So still runs Twitter while saying he kept the promise from his Twitter poll...
That said spam seems to have dropped and recommendations I get are pretty interesting so hope that continues.
They are different skill sets.
It’s worked remarkably well to have Gwynne Shotwell run things at SpaceX (she’s an awesome COO and also an aerospace engineer). I have wished for years that he do that at Tesla.
Having an ad exec run Twitter will take care of all the “how do we pay the bills” part of running the business while he does the “fun” stuff of focusing on product.
Update: Updated Gwynne Shotwell's title to COO, not CEO (and fixed spelling of her name).
And apparently, Twitter has millions of dollars in bills that it hasn't been paying. See this other interesting article, posted today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35918253
The reason it's such bullshit is that it's essentially hostage taking: "Why yes, I know we owe you $10 million and that's what we agreed to, but we're just not going to pay. You can sue us, but we have top notch lawyers that can drag it out for a long time, or else you can settle with us for $7 million right now."
I think there should be an equivalent of "small claims court" for cases like these where flat out missed payments are handled quickly and without the need for expensive lawyers, e.g. "Here's our contract, there is no disagreement that we delivered, so freeze their bank accounts if they don't pay us immediately."
Point being, I don't think a top notch lawyer will win, but given the cost of litigation (plus the time value of money), expensive corporate lawyers can force small vendors to settle with a sizable discount.
And wouldn't have the loosing party pay everything in such a case, making it a very expensive case for them?
For a multibillion dollar company, especially one trying to STOP using things it’s currently obligated to use, the math works out different.
After all, being evicted actually helps them, as it breaks the lease and they don’t need to keep paying.
Especially when there is a huge commercial real estate crunch looming in many of these markets.
Plenty of delay and hassle tackles can be used to get some leverage when the letter of the contract/law isn’t in your favor.
Scummy, but often effective.
Musk, CEO and “Chief Engineer”, mainly just fucks things up like causing DOD investigations into his pot use (a disagreeable government contracting clause due to the War of Drugs), and now most famously overruling the real engineers and thus overseeing the destruction of the Starship launch pad, and promoting an FAA and environmental investigation.
See also: Overruling Tesla engineers and ordering the removal of radars, directly leading to multiple preventable accidents.
He’s fuck up. Rich. But still a fuck up.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1313952039869788173?s=20
https://www.drive.com.au/news/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-engi...
> And she runs the show at SpaceX.
No she doesn't, and she wouldn't agree that this is the case. Only anti-Musk haters claim this.
> mainly just fucks things up
Funny thing to say about the most successful space company in history. Shotwell wasn't even COO for the initial success of the company.
> causing DOD investigations into his pot use
A literally 100% inconsequential thing that changed absolutely nothing and had no effect what so ever.You are really grasping at straws with this one.
> most famously overruling the real epromoting an FAA and environmental investigationngineers and thus overseeing the destruction of the Starship launch pad
He has the finial decision on all things at SpaceX and had them since Falcon 1 days. He didn't 'overrule' his engineers, at SpaceX decisions are usually made in big meeting with input from everybody and Musk makes the final call. Doing the launchpad upgrades before the first launch would have meant further delay of first launch, thus delaying getting flight data. Now they can evaluate the flight and fix the pad at the same time. Also the launch pad isn't destroyed, its slightly damaged. It was the wrong decision in hindsight but it isn't that relevant going forward.
He takes responsibility for things he gets wrong. He also decided not to have slosh baffles on Falcon 1. That led to its failure. He made other mistakes, if you want you can go threw the history of SpaceX and point all of them out. He also insisted on Deep Cryo fuel that lead to Amos-6 but it also helped SpaceX in the long run. And he takes ownership for these mistakes. When you make a lot of important technical choices, you get some of them wrong.
But its downright sad of you do cherry pick a few things SpaceX got wrong when SpaceX threw-out its history, with Musk as the final decision maker has clearly gotten things right far more often then they have gotten things wrong. Again, SpaceX is literally the most successful space company ever and it isn't really close. Musk has also been the longest serving CEO of pretty much any space company in the industry.
> promoting an FAA and environmental investigation
The amount of times the Musk haters people have claimed that some federal agency will destroy SpaceX because of 'evil Elon' is ridiculous. They knew the risk and some non toxic concrete wont change anything.
If we actually go by factual evidence, companies that Musk was in charge off. How successful are these companies. The result is clearly, Musk is one of the most successful business people ever.
You can personally dislike him and dislike him for choices he made, but saying he is not responsible for SpaceX and Tesla success is ridiculous.
My position is that the companies would be MORE successful if they fired his ass. SpaceX is the most successful venture, because he’s actually the least involved.
But yes, every major decision can be traced back to him, and it’s an epic fail. Hell, I even forgot about him insisting that robots could do finally assembly, even though every company that tried it failed — repeatedly.
Face it. Sempai is a screwup, and he wont let you on the B-Ark either.
So being the single most successful companies in their industry is not enough. You certainty have incredibly high opinion all the leadership behind these companies. And how do you come to this conclusion?
Shotwell is the only one being very public. She had a good career before, but not one that would suggest she could have lead an even more successful company. Most of the rest of SpaceX leaders after the initial set were promoted internally.
Nobody in the leadership of Tesla had such an amazing CV to believe the could do even better.
It seems pretty simple, you don't like him, therefore you just choice to believe that everything would be better without him even if there is no evidence that this is true.
> But yes, every major decision can be traced back to him, and it’s an epic fail.
So every major decision is a fail yet the company is hugely successful both in technology and business. You are so fucking deluded on this issue, it hurts my head to even try to understand your logic.
> Hell, I even forgot about him insisting that robots could do finally assembly, even though every company that tried it failed — repeatedly.
And yet now Tesla has some of the best manufacturing in the world. Their initial approach was flawed in execution but the direction was correct, they corrected and improved, within a year of this issue Tesla had solved the issue and had a highly profitable mass produced EV that changed the industry.
Now lots of companies are copying their processes that came out of that experience. The CEO of VW admitted the the threw-put of Tesla factories was far superior to their own.
You just repeating the same pattern over and over, blame Musk for all bad, don't give credit for good.
Your line of argument is just embracing and you would laugh at anybody making such arguments if it wasn't about Musk. This is just a simple case of you having some sort of personal hangup about Musk therefore you need to somehow justify your position.
> Sempai is a screwup
Man, I wish I had screwed up so much as to be one of the richest people in the world. What a fucking loser.
It can work - most famously, this was the structure that Google had in its golden years (2001-2011) with Eric as CEO and Larry & Sergey as presidents of Product & Technology, respectively. It also was sort of the structure of Apple with Steve Wozniak as an IC & founder. But it puts the CEO in a very awkward spot where they're in charge of the organization but not really in charge of the organization, which in turn requires leadership with great humility. That's not really what Elon is known for.
The structure of SpaceX or Facebook or Apple 1998+, where you have a visionary CEO and then strong COO under them that makes the trains run on time, is much more common and less fraught with conflicting reporting lines.
In this structure, Elon is embedded in the decision making loop directly. The CEO normally is responsible for the company, but instead, Elon has decided that the CEO will deal with making money while he makes all of the decisions as to how the product works. Which essentially cuts the CEO of of any decision making aside from business partnerships, making her more of a VP of Sales than CEO.
If the issue is the advertisers need someone to escalate too (and someone who Elon would listen to when he needs talking out of some half baked idea), then it is a good fit.
If the idea is to have Twitter actually functional as a product driven engineering company, then yeah that won’t work. But baby steps.
They all want to be CROs (Chief Revenue Officer) now.
That means that he's visible in the office (because bye-bye remote work), and when there are product/technical questions, it's unclear to employees whether Elon or Linda is the ultimate decider. It's normally not a problem that the board can fire the CEO, because employees never interact with the board and often don't know who they are. But when the chairman of the board is also an ordinary employee, some fraction of employees will follow the official reporting structure and do what the CEO wants, while some other fraction of employees will follow the "power behind the throne" and do what Elon wants. The result will be a company that can't agree what it's doing, with multiple competing groups working at cross purposes.
This was a huge problem at Google, both in the early days and today. Larry and Sergey would go directly to engineers with ideas, and then those engineers (hoping to get a coveted Founder's Award, and out of respect for the founders) would drop what they were doing and work on Larry's ideas. It worked in the 2000s, because Larry & Sergey's product judgment actually was really good - that's how we got GMail, and Chrome, and YouTube, and Android. But it's also the root cause of much of the organizational dysfunction that affects Google today. Google culture follows competence, not reporting lines, which means that one giant company is actually 1000+ small groups of unrelated projects, most of which duplicate each other, that never integrate quite right, which will often be technically brilliant but then blocked or unlaunched as soon as they cross some competing executive's path.
Linda, because she is the one who is there every day. If Linda thinks Elon has made the wrong call, she just has to work out how to talk him out of it while soothing his ego, and in the meantime get her team to focus on how to implement the right one. She probably already has that skill, but if she needs mentoring, Gwynne Shotwell can help her out
That sounds exactly like the Twitter I've known for nearly twenty years.
It is actually extremely common for corporations which aren’t regular business as such - for example, trustees of family trusts are commonly corporations with a single director who is the person who ultimately controls the trust. Also a common structure for sole proprietorship businesses that want some protection from legal liability.
I own a company which never has done anything (I was daydreaming). Its board of directors has one member-me. Legally, I am required to hold annual board meetings with myself, although I believe the legal obligation is met if I hold them in my head. “This year’s financial results: zero revenue, zero expenses, zero assets, zero liabilities, zero employees-another great year at does-nothing-corp!”
Otherwise, it’s easier to pierce the veil.
I once worked for a small Corp that the office manager was the board secretary and literally had a meeting with just herself for such a purpose.
I'm guessing what you actually mean is "Also a common structure for one person who does business on their own, who has incorporated, and who is their own sole board member." Is my inference correct?
[https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...]
Interestingly, they're overdue on their bill with Companies House it looks like. Oops.
Lots of entities in Delaware named Twitter Inc. (3) plus what might be a holding company or two. Hard to tell without more digging.
[https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/eCorp/EntitySearch/NameSearch...]
Small firms it is common to have a single person board of directors, where that single person is the 100% owner.
When private equity takes a large firm private, they’ll often appoint a board full of their own partners and consultants/advisers-if you own 20 different firms, you don’t want to deal with all their CEOs, you want a layer between the CEO and you-which is where the board helps.
100% subsidiaries (such as a large multinational firm’s local subsidiary in each country) commonly have multi-person boards of directors, with a handful of local senior staff on it (e.g. country director, head of local finance, HR and general counsel) - they usually all just rubber stamp whatever HQ wants, although occasionally they might refuse (e.g if local counsel insists HQ’s demands are illegal and complying with them would make the directors personally liable)
I should point out that in the traditional legal sense of the term, even US LLCs are corporations-it is just that people in the US have adopted some weird redefinition of “corporation” which excludes them. Under Australian law, a US LLC is a corporation, albeit a foreign one. Worldwide, I think most countries legal systems would reach the same conclusion
The British monarchy is a corporation (a corporation sole) - actually, a whole bunch of distinct single member corporations (the monarch), one for each Commonwealth realm, and also one for each Australian state and Canadian province - each called “the Crown in right of X”. Maybe that’s an example of a corporation without any directors, although one might (rather meaninglessly) claim the monarch is the sole director
But you have a great point about CEO vs COO. As the technical CEO of a small company myself (who loves building things), I know you just have to deal with certain things directly and dedicate your name and time (not complaining, that's just the job) and that takes time away from the day to day building.
I interviewed there a decade ago. Response: someone told me I wasn't a culture fit.
But this wasn't the normal "culture fit" response, oh no. You could tell it was a "you aren't willing to drink the coolaid" type of response. I feel I dodged a bullet.
Your comment is a pretty good example of the kind of organizational dysfunction that results from unclear reporting and leadership vacuums. From the inside, lots of people are doing their job and doing their job well. From the outside, all this activity and all these highly-paid and highly-talented employees don't result in anything novel or useful. The company keeps chugging along, making boatloads of cash from its existing customers because old habits die hard, but gradually loses its capacity to adapt to market shifts. Then when a market shift happens, it goes out of business.
Twitter's problem is that a market shift is already underway, and their financials are precarious. Companies like Oracle or IBM can limp along for decades as long as their customers stay in business. Google is in the middle - their business is probably more precarious now than it's been in 20 years. Twitter is at imminent risk of death in the next 1-3 years if they don't turn the ship around.
Oracle has so many acquired products, many businesses are paying for one and people don’t even notice. For example, NetSuite for accounting. Cerner runs hospitals. Lots of industry-specific software in utilities, insurance, manufacturing, etc
Compared to (say) IBM, Oracle is much keener on killing legacy products
No idea about their web UI (although it can't possibly be as bad as the UIs of some of their legacy on-premise products) – but serious usage one tends to use the APIs much more than the web UI.
I heard about a few things on the grapevine, but in a 100,000 person company things are going to happen, you can’t really generalise from the occasional incident.
That's a good description and it is the de facto structure of a great many companies I've worked in/with. I would say it's relatively normal to be honest
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/13f45mw/com...
But actually following any of them? No thanks.
Language is important and I think lots of it, like "facebook friends" was not choosen well.
If there’s one thing that massive for profit corporations can’t stand it’s capitalism.
Not necessarily, it depends how things get implemented.
There isn't any reason Twitter couldn't build content classification tools that allowed advertisers to select which content to cluster and be targeted with and which content to exclude for perception reasons. The latter is easier than full moderation because it is much more tolerant of false positives.
Or it could focus on distinct product, like whatever their new video content platform thing is going to be.
Or maybe DM based ads.
Or opening up the third party ecosystem again and doing more on the channel side.
Or Musk has said a bunch of things about payment platforms that he wanted to do a paypal and wasn't able to implement but now has an opportunity to try. Similarly for things like identity/IAM products or other internet glue.
Or they could pivot into other advertising platforms and manage spend and and automation across different social media properties in addition to Twitter's own.
Lot's of different potential direction.
That is not to say that Musk's interference is "bad" from a company valuation standpoint as he clearly has a pretty good idea of what features he can effectively market to customers, it is just that those features are not markers of good engineering or actively detract from good engineering. For instance, selling FSD to the general public despite it not working is a criminal engineering decision, but it has done wonders for cash flow and their stock price.
Of course, this is all small potatoes compared to the immense amount of money Musk has raised for Tesla from consumers by falsely claiming they will have autonomous vehicles next year, every year, for 7+ years.
These raises are distinct from any government support they may have received, though his ability to structure the companys to receive government support and the cash flow generated from those activitys may have been helpful in supporting the companys and the narratives they built to achieve the valuations and funding levels they got. It really just all leads back to him being amazing at getting his hands on huge gobs of money.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/01/03/spacex-...
[2] https://payloadspace.com/predicting-spacexs-2023-revenue/
[3] https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/spac...
EV subsidies were made as a way for the government to encourage consumers to buy electric cars and encourage car producers to make electric cars. It’s not like they were made with the purpose of making Musk rich and literally any other car manufacturer or rich person wanting to make a car manufacture could have done the same. Should the US have never subsidized electric vehicles or should have all the car manufacturers have ignored the subsidies and continued to to completely ignore the EV market?
Complaining that someone filled a market niche that the government very intentionally created just seems so weird to me.
SpaceX has been spending billions on R&D, that's what the fund raising is for, that's why their spending is greater than revenue, the results of which are clearly visible in the weekly Starlink launches and rapid development of Starship and which have a strong business case.
This sort of bad faith analysis is exactly why companies in industries with significant "front heavy" investment have such a hard time.
Honestly, I would rather send my tax dollars to SpaceX, that over-delivered on it's promises than to other players, like ArianeEspace... [0]
[0] https://www.space.com/europe-no-reusable-rocket-until-2030s
In fact, credit hurt Tesla quite a bit because they burned threw them very early on when lithium batteries were super expensive and then later foreign competitors could undercut Tesla using mass market vehicles by using the credits.
And fuel credits are an enforcement mechanism that gives rewards and penalties to car companies based on how well they follow regulations, its not a government subsidy.
> government space contracts
If you want to see how well space companies do when they only do government work, look at ULA and Boeing.
SpaceX from the beginning attacked the commercial market with great success and the US went from 0% of the commercial market to like 60-70% in like 5 years.
Yes of course SpaceX gets government space contracts, its fucking space, governments are involved. But SpaceX was literally the least government oriented rocket company in history.
If you actually compare SpaceX to other space companies and Tesla to other car companies, the claim that these companies are uniquely depended on government totally collapse.
Just one example, Tesla got 400M$ loan to produce Model S (advanced vehicle manufacture), Tesla paid this loan back with profit for the tax payer before they had to and change the car industry, Ford and GM took multi-billion $ loans built a few compliance vehicle and have since delayed the return of those loans.
But yeah, Tesla is evil subsidy company, when they received less and did more.
And the claim about his companies raising huge amount of money is also false, compare Tesla and SpaceX with its peers, like Lucid, Rivian, Blue Origin, Relativity and that story falls competently apart.
If you have watched Everyday Astronaut's tours of Starbase with Elon[0], where he explains in significant detail pretty much everything that is going on with the various prototypes, you'll know what I mean.
He's not a guy with an MBA that has somehow lucked out by throwing gobs of cash at various Hard Engineering Problems (although there's that, too.) Of course the bulk of the work is done by "rank and file" engineers.
[0] e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MQb9Y4FAE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
At a surface level. If you ever drill down on his shallow tech understanding, he sputters, kicks you out or flees.
Also, have a look at recent unedited videos of Tesla’s self driving. It’s not everything that was promised and it’s much later than promised, but it sure is impressive. However I agree it is being oversold and that’s extremely scummy.
To attempt to be civil, I will also state I find the hero worshiping of Elon to be similarly deranged.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
I'm not sure about Elon's proficiency with software, but based on his comments on twitter I'd lean on him being out of touch there. He does seem to be knowledgeable on the AI/DL side though, see Andrej Karpathy's comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. I don't care whether it's boo or yay, we just don't want shallow flamewars on this site.
Dan, this line of yours cracked me up! Big Time!
Gave me a good laugh. (which I don't get to do much these days)
There is ample proof that this is a patently false statement.
Link with sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
My favorite from John Carmack: John Carmack (Twitter, Wikipedia) is a programmer, video game developer and engineer. He's the founder of Armadillo Aerospace and current CTO of Oculus VR. "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
There are tons of pictures of Elon in the early days of SpaceX literally using CAD software to design rockets: https://i.insider.com/63a0c11eb5600000185b5e8d?width=1300&fo...
https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-history-biggest-momen...
His title at the company is Founder and Chief Engineer, and there are tons of anecdotes from employees, as well as statements directly from Musk that major engineering decisions go directly through him.
Can't speak to what it takes to do CAD, but as a developer I know for a fact that being capable of writing code is a very low bar.
I do think the picture painted of him tracks with what I know life is like as a senior engineer.
Above L5 at Google, most engineers do not spend much time coding. Most time is spent approving CLs, mentoring, collaborating on design docs, and helping to make major engineering decisions.
Same with other faangs. This tracks with Carmack’s (and others’) description of Musk’s role.
In Paypal’s S-1 filing with the SEC in 2002 [1] to go public Elon Musk is listed as a director of the board and is reported as having graduated from UPenn in 1995. Elon Musk received his degrees in 1997 [2]. I do not know about you, but I do not know any college graduate who can not tell me the exact year of their graduation after a little thinking even if they graduated decades ago, but in this case he could not even accurately recall what occurred 5 years ago and he reported that in a SEC filing of a company where he was on the board (and formerly CEO?). Sometimes people forget the year they graduated, but not in SEC filings reviewed by lawyers, that is 100% deliberate.
Elon Musk viciously attacks his critics like when he viciously accused Vernon Unsworth, the cave diver, of being a pedophile, doubled down, and sent a investigator to harass him [3].
Elon Musk actively cultivates a cult of personality and directs them to attack his critics [4] causing them to be fired or quit due to the harassment.
He is also well known to impulsively fire employees that speak out against him. Also to harass employees who are being fired such as when he declared that the Iceland Person of the Year was faking his lifelong disability to get out of work [5].
Elon Musk does not get the benefit of the doubt when discussing his personal qualitys and when looking for 3rd party support since he makes significant effort to actively shape the narrative.
His personal statements are useless as support. Most of the people quoted were employees speaking on the record. You would be hard pressed in any company to find employees who would speak negatively on the record, let alone in a Elon company where he would fire, harass, and sue you if you did so. So, those are worthless. The rest of the people are then largely people who have not worked with Elon or are not experts in the field. And frankly, since Elon does not get the benefit of the doubt, the burden of proof is not on me to discredit their statements, but on the opposing perspective to provide proof that their statements are informed and credible.
As to the photos, the first one is obviously staged. The photo of him looking at wreckage unrelated to demonstrating engineering competence. It is also likely staged. No other images presented are relevant.
Labeling yourself as a Chief Engineer does not make you a engineer. In anything it lends support to the opposite because what actual engineer constantly broadcasts that at every possible opportunity so that everybody knows.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1103415/000091205702...
[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/musk-physics-degree/
[3] https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/08/elon-musk...
[4] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/28/cars/tesla-ntsb-cummings/...
[5] https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/07/elon-musk...
People love to claim this but its just not true. Compare how much money Tesla raised to other EV companies. Tesla did far, far better with far less money.
The accusation that his companies are successful because he can just magically create money comes from tech people who have no idea how much it costs to grow capital intensive business.
Both SpaceX and Tesla have comparatively raised very little. Compare how much Lucid, Rivian, Blue Origin or Relativity Space raise and then compare the results after similar time-frames.
> All credit for engineering successes at those companies is entirely because of the leadership of those companies, like Gwynne Shotwell
Shotwell wasn't even the COO of SpaceX before Falcon 9 days. And magically Tesla doesn't even have a Shotwell figure and is still incredibly successful.
And even if Shotwell is great, Musk hired her, Musk promoted her, Musk empowered her. Putting the right engineers into the right places is maybe the most important skill in leading a tech team. Musk putting Mueller, Königsmann, Buzza, Shotwell in those positions and gave them all what the needed to succeed, while he coordinated and made the final decisions. That is what 'Chief Engineers' generally do.
> we have seen time and time again to be actively detrimental to engineering success
Except that far more often we have seen it to be extremely successful. I'm always astonished at how people who seem to dislike Musk can selectively read history. Anything bad at SpaceX, Musk is at fault. Anything good, Musk wasn't involved.
> but it has done wonders for cash flow and their stock price
It really hasn't, if you actually look at their cashflow. But maybe I'm not looking at the fantasy investor report you have in your head. I just looking at the one that is publicly disclosed by Tesla.
And in terms of stock price, if you actually look at all the major wall street analysts, the majority of them never had a huge amount of believe in FSD being a major driver of Tesla and only included it into their most optimistic long run bull cases.
Tesla stock really jumped when they showed profitable margin Model 3 mass production and spiked for a while when the market went crazy for all EV stocks. Not just those who claimed to have 'FSD'.
*Hyping things, pumping stock, raising $.
If you actually want to argue on HN, you need to actually provide some analysis.
Because factually speaking, if you actually compare Tesla and SpaceX with peer companies rather then by themselves they have not raised a lot of money relative to what you achieved.
Go and actually compared Tesla, Rivian, Lucid (not to mention other bullshit companies like Nikola, Faraday Future, Better Place) and so many others. You will see that Tesla for a such a capital intensive business didn't raise that much.
A few times they optimistically raised when the stock jumped, but that's just good business. And if you actually look at their cash balance, that money was never even spent. It permanently raised the balance. Tesla would have been totally fine without the last 2 cash raises.
And for SpaceX its far harder to do the pump and raise shit you are talking about. Its only large institutional investors who don't randomly just buy lots because of some 'pump'. The funds investing in SpaceX have a lot of their own technical knowlage and evaluate things deeply.
So in summation, your claims have zero bases in reality, its just away to justify your hate for a person.
Are they? The majority of his successes came from investment, not from building.
[edit] I think his superpower may be wealth, like iron man.
(To cut to the chase there, Elon seems to have gotten around $90k from his father, of which $28k was a loan. You can check out Errol Musk's Sun interview and the wikipedia article for more info)
> Elon Musk: "... In South Africa, my father had a private plane we’d fly in incredibly dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia."
I was talking about how a lot of his success came from Tesla, where he wasn't a founder, but instead an early investor. He started calling himself a founder one day, and the actual founders sued him. They settled. [2]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140729222547/http://www.forbes...
[2] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/tesla-ceo-settles-for-...
There is nothing more complicated in his decision here. Elon is a visionary and a builder. That's all his ventures.
Another thing you may not know: Twitter will soon be competing with Youtube.
In the sense my walk through the park today "competed" with Kipchoge because we both propelled ourselves forward on legs, sure.
Twitter video is by far the least functional it's ever been, and this is a relatively recent (past ~month) development.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/18/23687125/elon-musk-...
It makes sense in terms of how I can imagine Elon's vision. It doesn't (to me) make sense as any kind of realistic proposition.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657050349608501249
>Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.
Musk is just steering it one particular way.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
Be careful, you might be undermining a narrative.
I am not normally a fan of the term "virtue signaling" but I think her involvement with WEF might just fit.
It could be virtue signaling, but in theory following these people could be virtue signaling as well.
Well, "Hack jobs" with living, sentient beings is close enough for me:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/05/neuralink...
> Twitter has fully complied with more than 80% of government and courts’ requests to remove or alter content since Elon Musk bought the company, up from around 50% before he took over, according to a report from the technology publication Rest of World, reflecting a discordance with the billionaire’s promises to limit political censorship.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
Well, come on, that was true under Dorsey too, he was just criticized for it by the half of the people who are now praising Elon for it.
An LBO. It’s become clear Musk’s employment cuts haven’t brought Armageddon. He’s now installing an advertising executive as CEO, which portends a return to the status quo business model. This is a classic cut-the-fat corporate raid.
Is it clear? I haven't really used Twitter since well before the acquisition, but I've heard nothing but complaints about bugs, ad revenue falling off a cliff and replies being nothing but right-wing reply guys.
> This is a classic cut-the-fat corporate raid.
If this were true, Elon would have cut the actual fat. Instead he (directly and indirectly) destroyed Twitter's relationship with advertisers, which was the only meat in the company. All that's left is fat.
They’re allegedly approaching cash-flow breakeven [1]. Musk is notoriously unreliable with timelines, but he tends to be conservative with purely financial ones. That, assuming this is actual cash flow and not an unlevered metric like Ebitda, signals stability.
I’m not calling it a success. But Twitter is operational. People complained but, largely, haven’t left. The new product initiatives were busts, but quickly withdrawn when the data showed they didn’t work. Stability is on the horizon; it’s not Armageddon.
> Elon would have cut the actual fat. Instead he (directly and indirectly) destroyed Twitter's relationship with advertisers
He did both. He’s now trying to reverse on the latter. Given the financial stability, Yaccarino has a solid foundation from which to do so.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-07/musk-says...
I think it's pretty clear that there was a lot of fat to cut. From a technical perspective Twitter hardly seems to be suffering at all.
The biz move (to pivot to a right-leaning social network) is what scared off users and advertisers, not the layoffs per se. In a counterfactual world where Elon slashed staff but left the existing policies and target demographics in place, Twitter would've been a lot healthier.
Posts and quotes fairly frequently don't load (though QRTs were never reliable) but more importantly they've stopped moderating everything, which is why searching for "cat" has returned animal abuse videos for the last week, and their solution was to turn off autocomplete of search terms.
(i should perhaps disclose that i have a very low opinion of Musk, but don't hate him)
At the moment it's hard to say whether the stream of small bugs (the one that annoys me is that the unread notifications indicator seems to be perenially out of sync) is just normal enshittification, or the foreshocks before The Big One.
This is what I meant. The vision is that of a classic LBO play. Cut the fat. Survive long enough to pay down the debt. Now you own a profitable company.
Now he'll move left again and cash in. Also of course there are considerations like Tesla subsidies and DoD contracts. But perhaps those institutions approved the above plan to restore centrist views.
Their entire platform is geared to be maximum advertiser friendly, aka the status quo.
It really isn't like YouTube doesn't discriminate equally, I'd even say in some cases they do so more strongly towards certain groups that tend to be left wing (e.g. queer people immediately being demonitized when not shrouding words like "biosexual").
Sometimes I watch a rightwing video, and then all I get is more and more extreme rightwing videos suggested.
Then I have to watch some leftwing video to get back to more balanced content :D... but there seems to be plenty of content on both sides, with suggestions leaning heavily on which side you watched the most.
Content that gets an extreme emotional reaction is strictly better at causing engagement, that's just like a basic sociological thing.
The result is that youtube pretty much constantly tries to radicalize everyone. It doesn't care if you get radicalized left or right, it cares that you go into rabbit holes that make you angry or emotional and have a reaction. I watched youtube attempt to do this to me, as I watched a singular video by a more radical than average leftist youtuber, and youtube immediately started recommending me the classic "angry incel right wing" content that so many young men are deeply entrenched in, but I have never been recommended in my 15 year old youtube account. Depending on your beliefs or research I'm not aware of, right wing radicalization might be more effective, as "it's not your fault, we just have to hurt and remove certain people" is more palatable to certain people than "the system is fucked and we have to gut it and work hard to build it back". In that case, it would naturally push right wing radicalization over left wing radicalization.
None of this has to be purposeful. However, willfully ignoring this outcome because it makes you a lot of money is actively evil in my opinion.
Because of the way Elon bought the company it needs to make a shit-ton of money and fast. Elon can't just sidestep that responsibility by vacating the CEO role.
> Last November, General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM) was among the first companies to announce pausing Twitter ads. Among those that took a similar path were General Mills, Inc. (NYSE: GIS) and Volkswagen AG’s Audi unit.
> Brands such as Mondelez International Inc. (NASDAQ: MDLZ), Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO), Merck & Co Inc. (NYSE: MRK), Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. (NYSE: HLT) and AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) have also not returned to Twitter in terms of advertising as of February, Bloomberg noted.
> Last month, Musk said that Twitter’s revenue had fallen by 50% since October because of a decline in advertising.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitters-revenue-drops-advert...
Don't forget that the company also has to pay $1.5bn a year to service the debt Musk used to buy it.
https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2023/04/12/twitter-s-a...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/271337/twitters-advertis....
https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/snap-q4-2022-earnings-...
Do you have a source for this? All I can find is an interview remark from Musk about the company "roughly breaking even," without any actual numbers cited.
That's how money-losing products get designed.
I don't understand how people view him as a product person. How is he making the product (Twitter) better?
Taking away an existing feature like verification and selling an objectively worse version back to people doesn't make the product better. Strengthening the silo effect by banning talk about competitors doesn't make the product better. Charging $50k / month for business verification doesn't make the product better, especially for businesses users.
I thought Twitter might improve because I believed the rhetoric about Musk being a product person, but I don't believe that any more. All of his moves have been short sighted cash grabs.
Is there a single thing about the (technical) product that's improved since Musk took over?
> pushed the chronological feed
It's funny how many people who did not even know they weren't using a chronological feed before, are now cussing him out for showing a "For You" page - when he just made it much more visible and easier to switch to the "Following" feed.
Super Follows in 2021 https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
Birdwatch (community notes) in 2021 https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
all launched before Musk took over.
Also, bookmarks have been there for years. As have subscriptions, and Community Notes.
Twitter as of 2020 was fantastic, and these features added essentially no value to it. On the other hand, the public API is now a mess, twitter circle tweets are being shown to people who were not supposed to see them, I get logged out of all my accounts at least once a week and most notifications have serious delays. I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.
Yes, that's why I wrote "pushed". Before Musk it was hidden behind a stars button. After Musk it became a huge button at the top of your feed.
> Community notes precedes Musk too.
Which is why I wrote "improved".
> Longform text is literally what twitter is not about, and a major turn-off for so many people.
People have circumvented that since the start with screenshots or 15 tweet long threads. It makes a lot of sense to offer the option that a lot of people have been asking for and using through different hacks.
> I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.
I joined in 2008 and my experience is that the development has been nonexistent for 10+ years. Rebranding bookmarks into likes was probably the worst idea. The fact that it doesn't do video well despite being the #1 news source for breaking news surprises me the most.
Let's suppose for a moment none of the objections to these "features" I raise are valid. Why are people not talking about twitter circles being flat out broken? What about the constant changes to the UI which no sane design team would approve - like removing the "RT by @account" text out of nowhere, then putting it back up a few days later. Improvisation and rollbacks to major decisions? Remember when a couple of weeks in they just let people pay to get bluechecks and major advertisers had to deal with verified accounts posing as them? The whole "remove legacy bluecheck" thing?
Twitter was afloat and since 2020Q3, posting profits every quarter, but revenue has crashed as a result of all this. I can't really get why these details like "improved community notes" are more relevant to some people than the blatant mismanagement.
Only use of long form text posts is so you know to block the person without reading them.
He did fix the awful old algorithmic recommendations by just firing the team who were bad at them, but it only worked once; it's not like ad targeting is any better. The new UI is just a slightly different version of forcing you onto the algorithm feed.
And to add to your comment:
> Mr. Musk, who has been CEO since buying the company in October, said his role will shift to executive chairman and chief technology officer. But Mr. Musk also made clear he wasn’t about to yield control over the platform, saying he would maintain responsibility for product, software and system operations.
From my POV, it's gotten objectively better at a rapid clip over the past 6 months and I've been seeing less off-topic stuff in my feed (which is basically anything not programming-related) or a few other accounts I follow.
Upcoming possibilities: video conferencing, micropayments á la WeChat.
I think the acquisition has opened up a lot of interesting possibilities and potential for a service that had become stale.
I didn’t say he’s very effective so far at whatever he’s doing. He caves to pressure and material realities like anyone and covers ass
Generally for me I mostly ignore the media as I find its largely distortions and half-truths. Not to mention Twitter is increasingly their competitor so unlikely to be objective anyway.
I just go on what I see with my own eyes and it seems pretty clean to me.
Can you name an actual nazi he is courting?
But his antics drove away a significant chunk of the user base I care about.
However, it's crucial to know if an account claiming to be a big company, government agency, journalist, politician, etc. is legitimate. Opening verification to subscribers is absolutely scammy, just a way to make a couple of bucks off the victims of culture war brainwashing.
EDIT: what I do think was a tremendous success is the publicity stunt. I've never seen any platform where people felt they should pay to let people know they were who they claimed to be. Kudos to the people doing the whole "twitter is filled with bots" psyop, it worked.
On HN, I'm not bothered at all. If I see the username "dang" for example, I know it's YC moderator dang also same with "patio11". I see HN as more of a private group discourse vs Twitter where it's public and where blue makes more sense. Akin to a forum, where I frequent like home-barista, the community is smaller and more focused so I don't see why having blue makes sense.
Twitter verified literally every public figure it could - regardless of politics - even those who didn't seem to need verification. However, being a niche contrarian blogger does not make you a public figure, and that's where I feel the resentment is located.
>I supported censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story because it helped Biden
>I’ve said on several occasions that I think Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden
>Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared. There’s nothing, it’s Hunter Biden, it’s not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It’s like a firefly to the sun.
That's sounds like a radical leftist to me with a severe case of TDS.
I spend less and less time on Twitter, and it's less and less enjoyable. Unless it changes drastically I won't still be there very long.
At best the quality of their recommendation system has dramatically declined. At worst they're intentionally favouring different stuff. In between there are slightly more palatable (than the worst case) options, such as that they're favouring overall popularity of content more over your individual preferences, but in any case all I know is that it's turned from a relatively pleasant experience to pushing content in my face that disgusts me.
I've also written recommendation systems. In fact, I've written one I used to run on top of Twitters API. And so I know from first-hand experience that it's trivial to get better quality recommendations more aligned with what I click on than what I'm currently getting. Something is seriously wrong, whether accidentally or intentionally.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cat-dog-torture-video...
I also now get pushed a lot of fight and public freak out videos specifically of black people with pages of replies talking about eugenics
The app pushes me back to “for you” repeatedly where this stuff mostly is, or I get a push notification, or it shows up in following feed sometimes for people I don’t follow
Ill never forget my interview at twitter in ~2007
>"What do you think that twitter is?"
>>"Well, most people think of twitter as a social media platform, but I think its a global sentiment engine and litmus"
Yes that was my actual answer.
“Twitter is my drunk aunt and uncle who absolutely hate each other at this point at a family gathering.”
Sums up the political discourse pretty well though.
Meanwhile hell drive the company and she can be the face
You, and others like you want to paint Twitter as some huge failure because you dislike Musk, and that's fine, but in reality the biggest advertisers have come back and with her at the helm even more will.
First of all, if you want to see some real crazy racist stuff go on LinkedIn or Facebook. People there are even worse than Twitter.
All advertising companies took a hit, and Twitter is actually almost profitable at this point, so if she improves things it WILL be profitable. As soon as he can start paying down that 12 billion loan things will get even better.
References?
This is the closest thing I could find and it doesn't really back up your assertion: https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitters-advertising-busi...
How is your gut feel more relevant than the technical analysis quoted by reuters?
You literally said:
> Twitter is actually almost profitable at this point
Should that be taken at face value? The man has repeatedly lied through his teeth, exaggerated, and misled the public for reason ranging from making money selling stock, inflating a meme coin's valuation because the mascot is the same breed of dog that he owns, hyping tech fantasies, up to petty rivalry.
I know that every business leader lies and or stretches truth, but his reputation for outright deception on all levels, especially when it comes to his businesses, is fairly established.
About as much as the word of any billionaire. The issue is we’ll only ever have his word, since Twitter is private, and being honest about financials when poor is bad for business.
I’m willing to believe it’s closer to the truth than not, though. For one cutting out ~5,700 employees, or around ~75% of your work force, is a massive cost reduction. According to Payscale[0] the average salary at Twitter was ~$117,000/yr. A quick calculation shows that annually he shaves off $666.9M (which is hilarious). Alongside decommissioning unneeded offices and removing all the completely unnecessary and expensive time-wasters I can imagine he’s at least saved $1B or more annually.
[0] - https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Twitter/Salary
Problem is he’s also loaded Twitter with significant debt to take it private. Estimated interest payments alone total to over $1.2b annually - so… we are actually losing an additional $200m annually even after firing 75% of the staff.
So 2.5 billion in expenses. In 2021 Twitter had Revenue of 5 Billion. So obviously they have lost a lot of revenue, as Elon himself has admitted. But between the cuts they are close to breakeven.
Now with a new CEO who is much more advertiser friendly they are going to get a lot more advertisers back. She will be the new face of the company. Then, likely they will start paying down that debt. Each time they do their burden will be less.
Tesla is the most profitable car company per car. Musk isn't going to have a problem making Twitter profitable, though he put himself behind the 8 ball.
As they say, at least it’s not rocket science. Except in this case apparently running a social media site is actually more difficult than rocket science.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-03/twitter-s...
Even if I take as granted the advertiser problem is solved, it seems like Twitter has still been hurt by much more than having a controversial CEO:
1. Musk took on significant debt in order to buy a company already slightly losing money. Because of this, it's not good enough for advertisers to just "come back", they need to greatly increase their ad spend on twitter.
2. Twitter's attempt to find an alternative revenue source (the significant changes to Twitter Blue) seem to have largely failed.
3. The disaster with verification is driving away some of Twitter's most important posters that generated content on the website for free.
4. Twitter's reputation as an employer has plummetted and they are presumably not attracting anywhere near the amount of talent they previously did.
2.First of all you don't really know the numbers, it's a guess at best.
3. They are getting bohemoth players who are going to be running shows on Twitter now. This is a huge deal and wasn't even possible on old Twitter.
4. People are desperate for jobs in tech right now. Besides they haven't been struggling to hire, they've been mostly laying off people.
As they run a profit they will pay that debt down (or refinance if rates go lower).
They are launching a lot of new stuff and the future looks way brighter
Who are these posters you are referring to?
I would bet advertisers like Apple got a huge sweetheart deal. The majority of advertising I see is (by volume), crappy "As Seen On TV" type products fronted by MANY different accounts (I can't block them fast enough), accounts promoting whatever thought leader angle they are working (also insta-blocked), and finally large brands that Twitter probably would like a lot more of.
This is a great listen to see both the intellectual might and capricious irrationality of Musk's leadership:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/797/what-i-was-thinking-as-...
The ‘new features’ are basically irrelevant and much of it has been chaos or failure. The fact is there’s not much in terms of basic feature churn that’s going to make Twitter much better.
Brand Trust is incredibly hard to build easy to lose and incredibly hard to rebuild.
Musk is a stain on Twitter there is no avoiding it. He could have accomplished faster feature dev without losing half of revenue and also could have done a better job rolling out verified and blue. In fact most CEOs probably could have done that.
It’s a pretty big fail he needs to replace himself and go do something else.
Then I saw what he did to twitter, the way he stirred everybody up creating chaos for reasons that were quite explicitly personal motivations.
I used to follow a few people and topics I care about. I now get a lot of unrelated stuff I don't care about. The system is tuned so I have to see the outrage even if I don't care about it.
This is either intentional or non intentional (a bug). In either case it's a mistake that Mr. Musk bears direct responsibility for.
Why? What happened? Was it COVID that drove him mad? That he had to close the factories and offices and whatnot? Was he already like that but I wasn't aware because I don't care about celebrities unless they literally appear in my timeline even if I unsubscribe and mute them?
Because of this, Twitter is ridiculously partisan on my feed. I’ve limited my consumption of it to very small subject matters and will likely jump ship totally to BlueSky with some Mastodon thrown in. I know a lot of people in science who have completely abandoned Twitter.
The way to seek even ground is for corporations to stop responding to media pressure, and for the press to abandon that role once society rejects it for them. Until then, the pendulum is going to swing too heavily in both directions.
Elon is still working on moonshots like Starship, but it let the core F9 product run operationally smoothly and rake in cash.
Last estimates I saw suggested they are still bleeding a lot of money every month.
So ummm who's gonna pay all of those people to make sure the robots and people make the widgets every day?
And you provided no source and narrowly scoped profitability to singular projects. This is so myopic when it comes to how a business is run.
SpaceX has the vast majority of the worldwide private launch market. It's the only company with a reusable first-stage booster. The cost-per-KG is 10-20% of the competition.
This isn't me speculating wildly, everyone with even passing familiarity with the industry knows this.
I never questioned their market dominance, I questioned their overall company profitability. The cost of building a rocket can be easily fudged to create whatever financial picture you want. Not to mention Elon Musk is notorious for doing this. Unless you have access to their financial statements, all of this conjecture.
> The cost-per-KG is 10-20% of the competition.
Uhh might wanna check your source, from Wikipedia: "These varying cost and requirements makes market analysis imprecise."...
probably some contract that will give them stability will appear from somewhere, at least until the ISS is decommissioned.
I do not believe Twitter is doing a great job or that they're somehow more profitable now.
I wish this notion of the "everything app" would die in the West. Yes, China has a highly successful everything app, but it exists because the government wants a centralized place to control digital activity. Such a model makes no sense in the west. We already have an everything app, it's called "App Store."
So many apps try to this strategy. For instance, Snapchat added games to the app. Why would I want to play a game in Snapchat when I have a nearly unlimited selection of games in the app store?
Maybe take this with a grain of salt but when I'm drunk I hate backtracking through UIs and being hampered by organization. I think an everything app would be useful in that case. And in the same vein as "the average human has less than two arms", I feel like the average end user is basically drunk.
You say this as if political parties here wouldn't be interested in that. ;P
iOS, MacOS, Windows, Android, Linux, etc. are already the “everything” apps.
Why the do we need an app that can do everything inside of an app that can already do everything?
It’s like wearing a hat on top of your hat.
I think your thesis about WeChat being more about a domestic choke point over the freedom of computing in China is largely correct.
I agree with you for that specific case: Snapchat games. But for a lot of other things, like payments (as Elon himself discussed doing) I appreciate some degree of convergence. Google has already done this sort of thing to a large degree and it's one of the reasons I like using their products. The reason it's desirable is convenience: using one UI and one login can be a pleasant experience.
Twitter has a long way to go though. I dislike their UI and my recent attempts to log in to their Android app resulted in me just deleting the app and using their web UI instead.
He’s throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks. Blue check subscriptions were a bust, so now he’ll try hiring someone to woo advertisers back. If that doesn’t work I guess he’ll try payments or something.
Speaking as someone who witnessed them from 0 to everything - it really has not much to do with that.
It has to do with how fast mobile payment swept through the country to be the connecting factor for all online services and it has to do with how easy it was and is for big players to out compete or swallow small innovators and harvest their innovations.
So I don't know. Maybe he's a good engineer when he's not on camera. But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately.
I think you'll find there's a significant split in perception between, for example, the average American and the pseudo-elites who inhabit Bluesky and Hacker News. Or the latter and the average actual hacker, for that matter.
Is there direct evidence of Elon's personal engineering prowess? All I can find are his own boasting and second hand reports of folks impressed by his familiarity with jargon.
Yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
But I was hoping to see some of his source code for Zip2, some CAD he'd done himself, or even a video of him solving some intractable problem in one of these rooms full of stumped geniuses.
Are we testing whether he knows anything at this point, or whether he's a literal Tony Stark? This thread started with discussion of whether he's any kind of engineer at all now we're looking for "rooms full of stumped geniuses" as if this was something every random engineer experienced.
Look I can go read Gates' code, so I have some direct evidence of whether his reputation as an engineer is worth the paper it's written on. The story for Musk is much less direct. Still, I'm open to studying the evidence of Musk's engineering chops.
The actual video it mentions is here: https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=1100
So those saying he's not an engineer at all are probably wrong, but those saying he's a good engineer probably aren't correct either.
I think it's also the case where his misses are more evident. If you said "We'll get to Mars in 10 years", people will likely have forgotten you said that after 5 years, much less 2 years after your boasted time frame expires. So people credit you for big ideas while not having to deliver on anything. Every year, we've been about a year away from fully autonomous self-driving cars.
Complaining about twitter and saying how you'd fix it is easy when you don't control twitter. But actually fixing it is a different story once you have all the control.
Promises are easy to make, harder to deliver.
(Btw, software engineers are not really engineers.)
Broadly speaking, I wouldn't rush to consider anyone a doctor, an engineer, a pilot, so on and so forth simply because I watched a video of them speaking so well to a very specific problem that they just so happened to work so closely on. That's all I was getting at.
For all you know he had some technical presentations given to him by his engineers and is just repeating the info within. I don't doubt he himself has enough engineering background to follow or contribute to the technical conversations at Tesla et al, but yeah.
At some point you just have to reason about how many companies he has and how much work he already has merely being CEO or chairman of these firms and how he could possibly be doing day-to-day engineering decision-making on top of that. And given the very public and embarassing exposes we've gotten from engineers at Twitter, I have deep, deep reservations that Elon is really a saavy engineer.
But he has never understood people, politics, etc. Which is what twitter is all about.
That is to say, Elon is not an engineer.
I've no doubt Musk can talk convincingly about engines or whatever, and maybe even about physics, but I don't think he could function as a professional engineer. I'm just not getting the impression that he has much depth.
[1] discounting Carmack who is brilliant but is a different kind of engineer
Even when Carmack was Zuckerberg's "subordinate" he was independently wealthy and could do whatever the fuck he wanted, and has been for a long time. You didn't see him going around, even then, talking up Zuckerberg's engineering chops. Despite the fact that we know Zuck did in fact write a lot of the early code for FB.
Carmack is also not a "different kind of engineer". Guy is primarily famous for his software, but he had a rocket company of his own, ran Meta's VR labs which involved quite a bit of hardware, etc.
I trust John Carmack in his wheelhouse, but without knowing him better I wouldn’t trust him to fix my car or recommend a beer, just because he’s prolifically qualified at building and shipping software.
I would even argue his recent work on VR for Facebook makes me question if he’s still “got it”, considering how wildly that seems to have flopped.
I’m excited to see what he does with his new AI startup, but let’s not canonize the man.
Carmack is absolutely qualified to talk about aerospace engineering. He also knows quite a bit about cars, FWIW.
Where is the list of legendary engineers who've worked with him who say the opposite? Seriously, even one example would be interesting to me. I'm not aware of any.
I dunno how many rooms with people like Elon you've been in, but people heap praise on people like that; it's free for them to do, and makes the Elon-type feel good about themselves, which materially impacts how much money those praisers have access to.
Once you get into the rank and file engineers, where the folks have a lot less to lose by speaking their mind, the praise has been much harder to come by, and you have incidents like at Twitter, where engineers called out Musk's apparent inability to comprehend Twitter's architecture, resulting in at least one heated exchange during a Twitter spaces chat.
I trust the celebrity engineers less than I trust the nameless engineers, at least when it comes to matters of PR.
Also, not for nothing, but if you haven't seen any negative comments about Elon from "celeb" engineers, you should probably look up the stuff Woz has said about Elon, it's not all positive, at all.
That's a fair statement, it could even be true. But the fact remains, what is confidently asserted by many lacks evidence to substantiate it.
> Once you get into the rank and file engineers, where the folks have a lot less to lose by speaking their mind, the praise has been much harder to come by, and you have incidents like at Twitter, where engineers called out Musk's apparent inability to comprehend Twitter's architecture, resulting in at least one heated exchange during a Twitter spaces chat.
I think it is useful here to refer to exactly what it is that you mean. I am aware of a few such instances, but the instances I am aware of are Musk being mostly right and the engineers in question being mostly wrong. Perhaps you are aware of different incidents.
> Also, not for nothing, but if you haven't seen any negative comments about Elon from "celeb" engineers, you should probably look up the stuff Woz has said about Elon, it's not all positive, at all.
Woz hasn't actually worked with Elon. Anyway in a cursory search, I can't find the quotes you seem to be referring to. I'm not disputing their existence, but a link would be helpful to make this concrete.
I don't believe this [0], and am going to step away from this convo now.
The baseline is the median HN commenter. And Carmack's opinion carries infinitely more weight than that. I would argue it carries substantially more weight than the 99th percentile HN commenter.
The point is: All of the people who have worked directly with him and are also famous for their engineering talent in various domains respect him. I'm literally not aware of a single example in the opposite category. And I'll take the opinion of widely respected engineers who've worked with the guy over the commentariat on an internet forum any day.
But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard. "I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him." A Diet Of Air And Water Jobs was hired as Atari employee #40, as a technician fixing up and tweaking circuit board designs. One of his first roles was finishing the technical design of Touch Me, a simple arcade memory game similar to Ralph Baer's later Simon toy.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/steve-jobs-atari-empl...
That sounds way more like an arrogant micro-manager than an engineer to me.
The quotes I read there make it sound to me like he's about as involved as Steve Jobs was. Which is not a compliment, coming from me.
But a compliment for anyone looking at the final results rather than focusing on an incomplete and external perception of the process.
Elon Musk is in charge of some projects that have amazing outcomes, yes. But does he actually know the engineering (which is kind of not a very interesting question to me), and is he horrible to work for?
I'm pretty sure he's horrible to work for.
Elon being a micromanager (assuming he is) can not be the only reason a rocket (re)flies each weekend.
> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
> He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
Quotes like that give me the impression he's very much involved technically.
The custommer is always right; even when they bloviate well beyond their area of expertise.
These people are not sycophants. These people do not need Musk. They have plenty of their own money. They are not speaking highly of him because they want a promotion, or they want to be in his good graces, or they're afraid of being fired.
You can still hate him for the way he behaves. You can still think he's a bad guy. But if you think your opinion of his talent or engineering depth is better than these people's who've worked with him, you should seriously reconsider your epistemic blind spots.
It's ok for him to be a good engineer and a bad person. Von Braun designed rockets for the Nazis and later the US space program. Nobody doubts his engineering brilliance.
As much as I don't like Musk behaviour lately, or how he try to picture himself as the founder of Tesla, it's really ridiculous to deny his achievements. And the money argument - "oh he just paid good engineers to create the companies" - is pretty dumb too - he wasn't that rich until 2 years ago, so why other billionaires didn't do the same thing ? Or all those other more talented engineers.
> or how he try to picture himself as the founder of Tesla
I think this can actually be reasonably argued both ways.
But, the way Musk tells the story or tries to push the narrative is very fishy. I remember reading Ashlee Vance biography of Musk, without knowing too much of him at the time, and while I was in awe about the achievements and boldness, it was also pretty obvious that the guy is childish and a dick.
Tesla was dead in the water before Musk, they couldn't raise money, they had so far only invested a minimal amount from founders themselves and were going nowhere.
Musk brought the money and the chief engineer that actually made Tesla car initially go. The founder CEO then over the next 6 years drove the company straight into the ground.
Musk then took over invested more money and 10 years later its the dominate car company in the EV transition.
I don't give a shit if he is the founder by some definition 'founder' where 'founder' means the guy who created the initial business plan (a business plan that kind of sucked btw). He is what made Tesla actually a real company rather then a joke for Detroit to laugh at.
Yes, this is more or less what I believe. Or to be more precise, I think over the past 5-7 years his fame, attention, and power have corrupted him.
> He's also been caught out since taking over Twitter of broadcasting very inaccurate things about the state of Twitters software stack.
I don't remember ever seeing a valid example of this. I do remember people dunking on things he said at various times, but those people were wrong, and he was right. Nearly all the Musk haters predicted Twitter would collapse after he fired half the staff, that it would fall apart. Former engineers wrote op eds about how it would happen. None of it did.
The particular instance to which I think you're referring was some front-end enginee attempting to falsify Musks's claims about how content was loaded, but the frontend engineer clearly didn't understand that Musk was talking about the micro-services that stitch together the feeds loaded by the front end code. Now, Musk may have been wrong - I don't know what Twitter's architecture looks like inside, but the guy who was criticizing him didn't either.
> Hyperfocus on the software is also definitely the wrong thing to be worrying about when it comes to running a content company and he's only made the product worse in his time there and has shown close to zero understanding what makes the site valuable.
I'm not sure I agree. I did think that at first, but I think he actually does understand what makes the site valuable - the users, and diversified revenue streams. He hasn't fully achieved that, but he has time. A social media site where you actually buy the product instead of being the product is what people have claimed to want here for quite a while.
Twitter is still humming along, and it's still growing: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23445476/elon-musk-twitte...
He could certainly be lying. He no longer has the kind of obligations not to that a public company does. But the idea that Twitter is dying or dead is just not the case. He certainly overpaid for it, and I don't think every move he's made has been good, but he's iterated rapidly, and been willing to revert unpopular changes quickly.
Those people can also be wrong about stuff. This is just an appeal to the reputation of those names. It doesn't give weight pro se.
I don't have an opinion on Musk's skills as an engineer. I know I've seen him be very arrogantly and confidently wrong about things I know pretty well. That's a bit of a red flag trait that probably bleeds into other areas of his life and work. But also, i don't draw this conclusion out of hate or prejudice for the man. I don't care.
On HN, i don't think you entirely know who among commentators is a prominent engineer.
The full phrase was important. If someone has worked directly with Musk and is basing their opinion on that, I expect them to say so.
And of course it also disregards what they actually said, its not just 'platitudes'. Some explained in great detail what he does and why they are so impressed with him.
Some of them like Tom Mueller went out of their way, years after leaving the company, to tell people not to assign all credit to them. Why would they do that, if they wanted that they could have just remained silent.
If a 'chief engineers' job is to coordinate multiple teams of engineers and make high level decisions to lead to a larger strategic goal, then that is what Musk clearly does and does pretty well and that is hard to question.
If he himself can design a rocket engine or an electric motor from scratch is questionable but I don't think that's what being an engineer is.
Err. Sure. It is, in principle, possible for all of these people to be wrong. But where are the well known engineers who've actually worked with him who say he's not? There should be quite a few by now, right?
> I don't have an opinion on Musk's skills as an engineer. I know I've seen him be very arrogantly and confidently wrong about things I know pretty well. That's a bit of a red flag trait that probably bleeds into other areas of his life and work. But also, i don't draw this conclusion out of hate or prejudice for the man. I don't care.
I've seen a lot of people make this claim. But every time I've seen this claim made in a field I know well, it was the person making the claim that was wrong, not Musk. Maybe in your case you're right. But my experience is that every time i've seen him dunked on for something technical, he was mostly right and they were mostly wrong.
For example, he was writing about the Bob Lee stabbing as if it was a random violent attack. I wasn't 100% certain but at the time I was extremely suspicious of this claim, based on knowing the block where it happened, it was basically guaranteed that Lee and the assailant were the only two people on the block and it was dubious a homeless person could have camped there. He started trolling the district attorney, who is more conservative about these topics than the last guy, but even she told him to STFU.
There was another example where he questioned the ethics of a place I've worked at. He didn't have a leg to stand on but he made public pronouncements.
Somebody who does that is not likely to be a good engineer. A good engineer waits for the facts to come in before reaching conclusions. He's clearly not level headed. I've seen loads of bad engineers who act like Musk in these circumstances. Sometimes they have good reputations in their orgs because overconfident narcissists sometimes get rewarded.
I think you can still be a pretty good engineer and believe that a stabbing in SF is probably perpetrated by a random homeless person absent other information. It may have been wrong for him to jump to this conclusion, but I don't think it has any bearing on his technical skills.
> There was another example where he questioned the ethics of a place I've worked at. He didn't have a leg to stand on but he made public pronouncements.
Again you may be perfectly right, but this has nothing to do with engineering talent. Lots of great engineers are famously assholes (in various ways): see, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, etc.
> Somebody who does that is not likely to be a good engineer. A good engineer waits for the facts to come in before reaching conclusions. He's clearly not level headed. I've seen loads of bad engineers who act like Musk in these circumstances. Sometimes they have good reputations in their orgs because overconfident narcissists sometimes get rewarded.
This is just not the case as any kind of rule. Like, sure, a perfectly rational Bayesian optimizer may not do these things. But real engineering at the highest level isn't about that - it's about intuition from experience about which system design choices will be good and which won't, and acting quickly and efficiently on that information.
The very small intersection of incredible engineers who are also very good people have the humility to quickly pivot when they've been proven wrong, admit it, and move on. Elon is obviously not in this category.
But I think you have to admit that it's telling that when pressed for examples of his technical failures in public, all you could come up with were completely non-technical examples.
This is different from Torvalds or Stallman. Torvalds is still writing commits for Linux, and they work. His public opinions are sometimes delivered sharply, but I have usually found them to be well based in fact. He's not going off on Twitter with a bunch of baseless personal attacks. Good engineers do not.
Also, it sounds a lot to me like you neglect the relationship between sociability and engineering work. It is a huge thing. It absolutely cannot be ignored to be a successful engineer. Linus, despite criticisms, is quite sociable and socially aware, and it's a big part of his success.
> Also, it sounds a lot to me like you neglect the relationship between sociability and engineering work. It is a huge thing. It absolutely cannot be ignored to be a successful engineer. Linus, despite criticisms, is quite sociable and socially aware, and it's a big part of his success.
Agree completely. But it is an objective fact that Elon Musk has inspired lots of engineers to work for him, and to do so at an incredibly high level of productivity.
Twitter was never my favorite web property and I checked out a long time ago, but I would come back to read long form tweets, developing stories, and the occasional rant. Now? Few people I look up to are using it and I feel like every time I look at a reply it’s flooded with blue check marks spouting absolute nonsense or hate.
Are normal people still using it?
But in terms of my other interest, there is very little difference.
The idea that its not all nazis or whatever is complete nonsense.
In general I think twitter is slightly better since the takeover. I'm sure that someone who follows and engages with different people could come to completely the opposite opinion.
It’s just like popular threads on /r/all on Reddit. Good luck finding something that’s not cringey, blowing things out of proportion, or a bad joke.
> "she"
> Well there goes the neighborhood
> Twitter was nice while it lasted. Women are always the ones who usher in radical leftism
Incognito on the web: all negative, mostly WEF new world order scaremongering, anti-woke hand wringing, and outright offensive comments.
Ironically, if you had not nuked your account you would probably see better replies. Twitter does after all, tailor which replies you see first to your account and followings.
I imagine this will be a bit like SpaceX where Sales and Ops is done by someone very good at that, and engineering is done by Elon.
It takes a realistic, self-aware person to hire someone who's better than them at their weaknesses, and is harder done than said.
Figuring out how twitter should work seems easier than that.
Wow the slant in this entire thread. When did HN become such a fervent Elon hate machine. Honestly curious, is most of this from his actions at Twitter?
It started as an anti Tesla narrative which was obviously paid for by the Tesla shorts, but this new supercharged anti Elon narrative ramped up when it started to become clear he was actually going to buy Twitter. So my guess is it's related to the interests of whoever was benefiting from the old regime at Twitter.
Legacy media may be dying, but clearly they still have the ability to program millions of brains. Even a lot of smart brains.
I'm not a big elon fan but that was objectively not a failed mission. They were very upfront that they expected it to destruct, and wanted to see how far it got.
Their entire launch, navigation, communication, engine/fuel/structure, and the self-destruction teams/systems all performed, and they assuredly learned a ton from that - both sensor data - and other things such as concrete debris from the launch pad being a problem.
From my understanding they were primarily were concerned about the launch stages and getting into an ascent and anything beyond that was icing on the cake. There was no payload, it's destination was to crash off the coast of hawaii.
So I wouldn't call Elon an "engineer" per se.
/s
For me it's mostly been (1) seeing less content from people I actually follow (because prioritization of Twitter Blue subscribers) while my own tweets are shown less; and (2) awkward conversations with people, where I can type 280 characters, but they can respond with infinitely long answers.
It is still a fairly slow and bloated site like always.
Need to add lots of filters to block all the politic garbage people spew, and mute anyone that repeatedly does this. Same as always.
At least on the aggregate.
There are still faux-experts shilling their brand on Twitter for sure, but recently it feels like there are a lot more authentic and casual chat that's easy to get into.
It may just be that Elon shaking things up and causing some people to move out destabilized existing cliques, thus making things more approachable to an outsider. But I for one am enjoying the current Twitter a lot more than the past one.
I use Twitter throughout my day.
The changes I have noticed are:
I can now access the Babylon bee account.
There are basic encrypted messages now.
There is a non-algorithmic tab on the homepage.
The top reply says "I'm the thickest 18 year old on Twitter" and has an NSFW profile.
The 5th reply tags a number of republican politicians and was posted by someone whose Twitter tagline is simply "Patriot".
The 6th reply is an image that says "It was justified" and the person's profile posts and retweets a bunch of pro-Trump and pro-gun tweets.
It really feels impossible to escape these types of political statements on the platform now.
Following Babylon Bee isn't mandatory. If you do, nor is reading the replies. FWIW I see memes not the thickest 18 year old on Twitter.
OK I think I understand what you're saying - every discussion turns political? Twitter has been that way since 2015. It's the world's public square. Only difference is people are allowed to disagree with Californian liberals.
It’s a gladiatorial arena (maybe WWE/performance art would be an even better metaphor) for the US culture wars. If they could please get it over with soon so we can return to normal programming, that would be great
What do you mean by "these types of political statements"? Right-wing ones?
Which account is political satire? The Babylon Bee or Elon Musk’s personal account? I kid.
> What do you mean by "these types of political statements"? Right-wing ones?
I intentionally didn’t label it. Where on the spectrum does a statement like “women can’t run companies” lie? To me, the issue isn’t political. It’s that people whose entire identity is founded upon fighting a culture war seem to be the loudest voices on Twitter. It makes the product very unpleasant.
> The 5th reply tags a number of republican politicians and was posted by someone whose Twitter tagline is simply "Patriot".
Which is labeled and is not particularly egregious, so that weakens your point.
I don't recall comment sections of popular or political accounts ever being respectful or interesting. But in some cases, the bots that used to plague every popular account's comments do seem preferable to that kind of stuff.
I’m happy Twitter has made the followers only feed a prominent two-tab UI. The algorithmic one was always completely useless. If Twitter can do what YouTube did to their feeds recommendations feeds Twitter can do very well but without TikTok style engagement metrics with videos are well suited for I have a feeling it’s always going to be bad on Twitter.
I get the feeling the only people who (ever) liked and engaged with the Twitter AI feeds are the same people who like Reddits r/all, which aren’t the sort of people I want to interact with anyway.
The new system is much more annoying for me, but it might be nicer for someone who wouldn't be able to learn about the old button.
This is the Following tab. It's only the people you follow. The "For you" tab is stuff from the edge of your filter bubble.
I follow a number of accounts on Twitter. If someone tweets, previously it seemed the replies which would float to the top would be the ones which were liked the most - like on HN - or perhaps from users that had the equivalent of good karma. Since the sale of blue checkmarks, now the replies which float to the top are from those shilling out eight dollars a month for the blue checkmark, and those top replies are usually inane.
Previously, well-known people would get a verified checkmark. One example talked about on the net is the singer Dionne Warwick, who lost her checkmark as she does not want to pay the eight dollars a month for it. There are two Twitter accounts calling themselves Clint Eastwood's official account - one has a blue checkmark and less than 3500 followers, one does not and has over 100,000 followers - I have no idea which is the real one, if either is. This also makes the platform less useful to use.
Beyond that, the decision to show every single reply from a Twitter Blue subscriber above any reply from a non-subscriber is one of the worst changes I've seen in a social media product. Elon chose to brand subscribing to Twitter Blue as a political act, so now below every tweet there's nothing but people who have agreeing with Elon's politics as a significant part of their identity.
It's not like Twitter replies were all that good before, and yet somehow he's made them significantly worse.
when is this going to happen? It's been a while now and seems to be the same twitter as usual.
It's still largely usable as a service, but it has absolutely gotten worse and to describe it as "sabotage" is definitely not a stretch.
Tech twitter has changed somewhat, with some people leaving.
But my other interest remain mostly the same.
> he turned a consumer choice into an unpopular political statement
Only a few people on tech twitter and some hard core rightist actually believe that.
> It's still largely usable as a service, but it has absolutely gotten worse and to describe it as "sabotage" is definitely not a stretch.
Yes it is. Outside of Tech twitter shitshow over Twitter itself Twitter has mostly been mostly the same before and after.
Maybe this isn't the case for LGBTQ+ or other communities, I can't judge that.
But overall to say Twitter is 'sabotaged' is kind of nonsense.
Also:
>> he turned a consumer choice into an unpopular political statement
> Only a few people on tech twitter and some hard core rightist actually believe that.
No, many legacy blue checks have observed it first-hand and talked about it, it's become a very common talking point - see "this mf paid for twitter". You must have a very sheltered existence on twitter and on the internet at large if you haven't seen this. Frankly I felt a bit cheap re-using that line because it's paraphrasing something that had already been said hundreds of times already.
> see "this mf paid for twitter".
Ok so hardcore anti-Musk people and rightist believe the same thing and it reinforces each other. Great, I don't care.
Neither of these groups are interesting or relevant and such discussions mostly happen under popular posts, not most things I follow.
Start by following people who do interesting stuff. Avoid the ones who post every day, because it doesn't scale. Once you are following a few hundred accounts, the frequent posters will drown out everyone else and the signal-to-noise ratio will be terrible.
Don't read the comments. Approximately 100% of them are garbage. Comments from the people you follow will appear in your feed anyway.
If the people you follow frequently retweet stuff from someone, consider following them. But only if you find their posts interesting and they don't post too often.
I guess this should still work, if the people you want to follow are still on Twitter.
On Mastodon (and previously on Google+), my strong advice is to use lists, and to essentially treat those as priority rather than topical classifications.
Usually that ends up being three tranches, high, medium, and low interest, where the high-interest list is about 10--20 active profiles (with time there may be inactives which accrue, though my tier-I list remains about 40--50 profiles). The 2nd and 3rd tiers are less selective, generally if someone doesn't seem to rate tier-I I'll bump them to II, and if they're getting too annoying there, to III.
Mastodon has the option to limit boosts (retoots) and replies by profile, so toggle those if someone's a good primary source but is overly profligate in their amplification.
More on lists generally: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109305354126509106>
I rarely view either my own "Home" stream (all profiles I follow) or the local instance / global federated streams.
Fuckwits get blocked: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019> It's AMAZEBALLS how much s/n improves when n is explicitly filtered.
On post/response type platforms (Google+, Diaspora* (yes, it's still around), good hosts are key, and what you're looking for is someone who posts interesting prompts and hauls out the trash in terms of low-quality comments. (HN's moderation team does a generally excellent-job-at-scale of that here ... present thread notwithstanding.)
Highly-voluable posters are almost never worth following directly --- what they lack is a self-editor, and you'll usually catch their interesting stuff through boosts or the equivalent. There's phenomenon I've noticed since the days of print newspapers where the highly-curated selected syndication of content gives a tremendously distorted view of the representative quality of a publication: when you're reading at the far end of a highly-selective filter, the crap and cruft has been cut and blocked. Prolific posters may achieve occasional hits and high notes, but the wheat::chaff ratio is often very, very low.
Similarly, there are profiles which post rarely but almost always with high salience. In a strictly streams-based view, these tend to get lost.
Another useful tool is directed search. Google+ actually had useful search at several points in its evolution (though it rather famously launched without any). HN's Algolia tool is a key value point to this site, and I mine both my own and others' content frequently, as well as search either articles or concepts as they appear or occur to me, with varying levels of success but at least the possibility is there. Occasional gems to appear. The Fediverse has taken a generally adversarial approach to comprehensive search (largely a futile effort as Alex Stamos has pointed out, and I strongly agree), though there are hashtags which can be searched, pinned, and/or followed, and some limited full-text search (your own toots, followers / local instance) which is quite useful. Platforms lacking effective search (Reddit, for comments, Diaspora* at all, Ello (back when it was more alive) in any useful sense) are severely handicapped. Yes, the feature can be abused, but it's also highly useful.
I would give him and Linda the benefit of the doubt before jumping to any conclusions.
Meanwhile:
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/12/14/former-spacex-engineer-e...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-tweet-elon-musk-captures-...
https://www.reuters.com/business/tesla-subjects-women-nightm...
If this was Yaccarino's decision, that's good marketing. But you need some follow-through as well.
I don’t think any decent CEO will tolerate perpetual undermining and I don’t think Elon has a “medium” setting.
For me personally it's largely academic at this point since I'm not coming back to Twitter without Tweetbot. But it's nice to see the follow-through on this one.
Edit: Looking at your post history, do you own a lot of SpaceX and Tesla stock? You do a lot of name calling to defend Elon, so your opinion defending one of the world's richest guys doesn't seem altruistic.
> What point are you making?
That your statement was inaccurate.
I just can't wrap my head around this. How can you both concede the behavior and be perfectly fine with and defend it?
1. I have not called anyone names. That is also false.
2. All people deserve defending from untrue statements about them regardless of how wealthy they are, I'm not sure why anyone would think otherwise.
The kind that has a CTO to do that.
I don't get the negativity expressed by top comments.
Yeah things were hectic at the beginning, but Twitter nowadays is a much better product than it was a year ago for me. Find a good niche for yourself and it's a gold mine for socializing online with a bit of curating.
Lots of ideologically-opinionated users are mad Twitter no longer censors and bans their opponents. They're upset that their patrons who enforced this got fired by Musk. Much seemingly unrelated criticism flows from this.
As to the actual Twitter experience, I've always used a chronological feed and never understood complaints about the algorithm. Step one to not being bothered by an opaque algorithm's control of your attention is withholding that control in the first place. I haven't noticed any change in my daily Twitter browsing in this regard under Musk.
Unfortunately, Twitter still censors and bans their opponents.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/15/twitter-s...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-st...
The neutral platform is gone. As we were so often and so smugly reminded, Twitter is a private company. They can ban who they like. This is the dog-eat-dog public discourse world you chose.
feels like people want musk and twitter to fail just for the sake of it.
i, myself, want the platform to thrive, because i absolutely love the idea of twitter.
Basically HN is where bored Reddit user comes nowadays as most of the relevant/influential users are still on Twitter (as you said you just need to curate the feeds well). So who really cares what Reddit know-it-alls think?
https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1657050349608501249
A few days ago, Twitter started requiring cookies when not logged in.
It’s a completely unsurprising thing to see when you actively court channers after kneecapping content moderation.
"The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon of women being likelier than men to achieve leadership roles, such as executives in the corporate world and political election candidates, during periods of crisis or downturn, when the risk of failure is highest.Other research has expanded the definition of the glass cliff phenomenon to include racial and ethnic minority groups."
Every usage record twitter has broken has been since he took over.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-30/twitter-s...
If you ask for a source, you're gonna get linked to one tweet of his dated Dec 18th. In totally unrelated news, Dec 18th just happens to be the date when World Cup finals in Qatar were held, before all the mindblowingly stupid changes.
But even if it did increase, it's just bots. There's a crypto scam at the top of US trending every day, and when you click on it and then click on latest and scroll down a bit, you just see a bunch of random 5-10 words followed by a hashtag. There's one right now, #Kicks. About 12 hours ago it was #Wednesdaytoken. It's gonna get purged when some employee finally gets around to doing that, and then the next one's gonna happen tomorrow.
not really, it's still his Twitter
I just hope she's getting paid upfront, given Twitter's current cashflow issues.
The negativity here is weird.
To the right, the WEF connection is concerning, and her commitment to free speech is in question.
But perhaps she just wants to make money from both sides of the political divide?
I feel like I missed something… Or dodged something.
I just want to view people's comments in a compact form - one line per tweet, even if RSS or equivalent is not supported. How do people have time in their day to scroll down the page to see all the tweets (&ads) on their timeline when they're following hundreds/thousands of people? If I can't integrate it into my RSS reader realistically I have <15 minutes per day to spend on such a platform.
How time flies...
Edit: http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/12/google-deprecates-their-soa...
Something so cripplingly limited shouldn't have a near-monopoly...
Recently I noticed how overwhelming some posts on HN can appear. 400-500 comments, the top rated comment alone splinters into 78 sub-narratives and criticisms. Contrarily I feel like parsing this takes a lot more effort than Twitter. People put a lot more effort in their HN comments compared to a Tweet, and we are held to a different standard here in terms as what we say and how we say it. Also consider the fact that Twitter offers a variety of content while HN offers one primary form (text; I’m purposely excluding what links that are shared offer and am discussing primarily the core of the HN experience which is the conversation on the actual site).
I say all of this to say, how do people have the time in their day to even scroll here? When you follow nobody (unless you subscribe to some users comments with an RSS reader, an option I’m becoming more fond of) and you actually have to do a lot of reading and thinking as compared to a deluge of Tweets that can be grasped in a matter of seconds.
On one hand, this is what makes HN an exceptional website in a way. On the other hand, what makes Twitter appealing to others is what makes it exceptional compared to other websites and why it’s doubtful that the majority of its user base will leave, unless the layout changes.
Overall, I think topics like literacy, intellectual curiosity, taste…and a lack thereof, contribute to why Twitter is either appealing and unappealing (I don’t tweet).
Yeah this site can be a massive time-waste. I try to only scroll through a thread if it's of significant interest to me or I'm on the train or something. Some days that effort fails and I spend too much time passively consuming trivia from here when I should be working. When it comes to non-tech topics I don't think the level of discussion on this site is particularly high but the quality of prose may give the wrong impression on first glance.
I get several thousand items in my RSS reader inbox each day (including HN headlines) - no way can I read a significant portion of that. Thankfully most news articles have limited new information beyond the title.
Unfortunately the public instances can get overloaded and really slow.
To get a more real-time like experience it's better to stand up your own instance and put it behind something like Tailscale so only you are using it.
Ironically that same algorithmic approach has been subject to complaint from all sides, with "shadow ban" accusations thrown around, including by Musk himself. So it's now less effective than it used to be, in the name of "equality".
A few hundred accounts will give you enough high quality tweets for <15 min a day.
Turns out, when you own the company, you can make the company call you whatever will best serve your ego.
So either he's a really good engineer or he's really good at hiring them, which means he's a really good engineer.
It's comical how much people hate this guy. He's a smart person you don't like, why is that so hard to accept.
Or someone else at SpaceX is good at hiring engineers? Is your conclusion that everyone who owns a successful engineering company is a really good engineer?
I think that his unique talents are not in engineering but sales. He's great at selling his vision to some people who will then bleed for him. He's great at fundraising and convince people to fund his ventures.
I don't think he's an engineering prodigy like Carmack or Wozniak. I don't think he's a product genius like Jobs. I think he's a fantastic salesman who finds bets that will pay off if you can keep at them for long enough, and uses his fundraising talents to keep his companies afloat until they do pay off.
He has a physics degree.
Lately, it looks like lower level (non-twitter blue) users have no incentive to come up with new content. If they do, high level users (twitter blue) will regurgitate it to their audience and it’ll be amplified to the top. Before, the playing field was level.
Twitter has had many outages; the objective stability of the webpage is worse after acquisition than before.
Why does it say I cannot see a tweet in a tweet I can see?
I suspect he wouldn't do too badly because he is sufficiently technical to know when he's being snowed and is also quite driven.
The problem isn't that he has no technical ability. The problem is he is unwise, and somewhat of an autodidact, convinced he's right irrespective of evidence. Lacking a source of directing force he is prone to making irrational, personally driven choices.
He also miscommunicates frequent. I doubt his "C suite" colleagues would welcome it, and so his directorate or board would be edgy all the time. Being in control makes me wonder if he's surrounded by yes-men and fires anyone who tries to argue back.
Whomever is in charge of manufacturing over there seems to be doing well. It took Tesla over five years to get their manufacturing act together. (Which is what the manufacturing experts who quit in 2016 said it was going to take.) But they finally did, and at long last, cost per unit started to come down.
New product development, though, is not going well. The Cybertruck is still not shipping. Nor is the big truck. A Model 2 has been announced, but is not shipping. And, of course, there's Fake Self Driving, which isn't mentioned much any more.
Come to think about it, Tesla as a high volume car manufacturer now seems to work better when Musk isn't around.
Yes. Quietly.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/03/03/tesla-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/business/media/elon-musk-...
I haven't been logged in to my twitter account for probably more than a year. And when I see an interesting tweet somewhere, my first thought is, why can't that person use a more decent platform?
Musk just showed us how a "not anti-capitalism" product management, from top down, could make Twitter catch up and keep up on the Zeitgeist of Internet User Experience.
Twitter and part of the public discourse was saved, Musk companies can benefit a lot from the same leadership and governance model spearheaded by Google on the 'Alphabet move'.
It's sad that people just want to buy the media buzz and witch-hunting because 'it is too much power in one person's hands'. I don't see this amount of critical thinking about Sergey and Larry, Besos or Zuckerberg.
When Tucker Carlson announced that he'd post his new show on Twitter, Musk already sent a cryptic mail saying that Carlson would be subject to the same "community notes" as everyone else.
We'll see how it goes, I'm just getting vibes that everything will be reverted to a standard SV company.
But it’s different when the founder/CEO is replaced only to return later. That’s a Steve Jobs play. When the CEO takes a new role, but still owns the company, that’s completely different (and certainly fits here).
Best estimates are "somewhere around 450k" which is $3.6M/month or $43.2M/year. Which is only $956.8M short of the $1B/year debt servicing he saddled Twitter with. It's a GENIUS PLAN.
All of twitter's usage records were broken after he bought it. All of them.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Ohanian
> [...] He was also a partner at Y Combinator.
> [...]
> On July 2, 2015, Reddit fired communications director Victoria Taylor, an administrator who coordinated celebrity interviews from Reddit's New York office. In protest, volunteer moderators of the IAmA community set their forum to private, effectively turning it off, and other volunteer moderators followed suit because of "anger at the way the company routinely demands that the volunteers and community accept major changes that reduce [their] efficiency and increase [their] workload".[40] The following day, a moderator of IAmA posted that "Chooter (Victoria) was let go as an admin by u/kn0thing [Alexis Ohanian]",[41] an assertion that was not widely reported on.[42] Media outlets such as Variety blamed interim CEO Ellen Pao for the dismissal. Harassment, which was already being directed toward Pao in relation to other controversies, intensified and she resigned a week later.[43] However, on July 12, former CEO Yishan Wong informed the Reddit community that Taylor was fired by "the CEO's boss" and accused Ohanian of scapegoating.[42] In the aftermath of Pao's resignation, Ohanian elaborated on his role in Taylor's dismissal, countering that even though the AMA/IAmA changes came from him, he still reported to Pao.[44] In 2017, Pao criticized Ohanian for avoiding the fallout by attending Wimbledon in the days immediately following Taylor's firing.[45]
Great visionary here
Edit: Someone clarified below that Knothing took responsibility for firing Victory but Pao definitely took the heat for firing victory on top of nuking several popular (edgy and outright bad) subs
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/comme...
What is this, a track record of 1? 2?
This doesn't seem like the type of thing you can do enough times to have a "track record" of.
Twitter is a well-established company that has been mismanaged for a decade and aggressively driven into the ground by Musk over the last 7 months.
These two situations aren't even remotely equivalent.
Gwynne was hired to make something out of nothing in an unproven space (no pun intended), having to build everything from the ground up (also no pun intended).
Framing is a fun exercise, you can do it a lot of ways.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me that Gwynne and Linda Yaccarino are finding themselves in utterly dissimilar situations though, right?
Not that Musk is demonstrably the opposite.
Be an executive at NBCUniversal in advertising, Twitter’s revenue engine, and also be on their CEO short list.
Getting there is left as an exercise for the reader.
Edit: lol, I guess she’s the President and COO, not CEO. Dunno if the point still stands, or not…
In the seven months since Musk bought the company he singlehandedly fired nearly every employee, accidentally locked the remainder out of the headquarters, turned blue-check validation into a living nightmare for international brands, un-banned some of the most notorious and repugnant users from white nationalists to bigots and racists, mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored, threatened to open a news agency to impersonation on his platform, cancelled most of the API, and tried to extort the very brands his platform depended on in a cash-for-validation scheme that backfired spectacularly.
This is 44bn of musks backing investors finally waking up to the fact that the willy-wonka they trusted to shepherd a communications platform was in fact just a billionaire heir to an emerald mine on track to grift them out of their dosh for his own petty feud with 'the libs.' Frankly its astounding theyre permitting musk to continue to do anything at all, albeit i suspect his new r&d role is about as authentic as his college credentials.
My solution is that on my tweets, I hide most blue comments. Pay me $8 if you want to be unhidden and seen, lol.
That could be 3 months or 18, but it's going to happen unless there's a complete about face at Twitter.
1.https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2023/04/11/twitter-...
2.https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/musks-twitt...
3.https://www.kqed.org/news/11935439/fired-twitter-janitors-de...
- $$$ from the blue (new thing)
- $$$ from subscriptions (new thing)
- $$$ from almost all advertisers returning
- effective $$$ from cutting the workforce by a small stadium worth of people
- ad revenue sharing in development
- long form video in development
- streaming video/podcasts in development
- encrypted dms being tested
And that's all there or coming in hot over the next few months. Pretty damn good for a company that apparently just barely operates if you listen to its detractors.
Over a couple of years it will morph into #1 news and media site on the planet (it's not really a social network).
You live in an echo chamber if you think advertising has returned to the same level, it’s been well reported through various sources.
Anyway it’s all private so we can only argue against imaginary number. If you think that Elon is getting rich from this 44 billion purchase, only time will tell.
- 3 x normal tweets
- advert (alza.cz)
- 3 x normal tweets
- advert (some scammy weight loss program called "mad muscles")
- 4 x normal tweets
- advert (t-mobile)
- 4 x normal tweets
- advert (some rubber feet product for washing machines so they don't jump around or fall over? is this a problem people have?)
Reduced headcount drastically and it's still working very well.
The biggest TV hosts are now moving to Twitter.
I've noticed zero difference as a too-frequent daily user. In fact, Twitter seems more fun now. Plus, community notes are sorely needed. In addition to all that, I'm also seeing an uptick in activity on my business account.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
If I never saw one as a daily user, they didn't exist, or didn't work.
It's way worse now. It may be less content. Or it's showing me less relevant content. Or it may be due to eurovision apperatly dropping hashtags from onscrean promotion.
But the end result is, it's worse.
Regardless, welcome to the real world. It’s not so bad sometimes. :)
Then change the option at the top of your timeline from “For You” to “Following” to only see posts from people you follow. Voila, now you get decent content that’s of interest to you.
Using this is way makes it like an RSS feed.
The hiring of a mass media ad-exec seems to support the validity of those rumors.
I assumed this was how it would go for me too, but after the change to elevate tweets and replies by blue check accounts I actually stopped using it because now, every time I look at it, it's just an orgy of the dullest and most ignorant and intellectually dishonest people in the world posting the worst crap I've ever seen. Last time I checked twitter.com the tweet at the top of my timeline was somebody "questioning" whether a recent mass shooter's multiple tattoos of nazi iconography could reasonably be interpreted to mean that he was in fact some flavor of neo-nazi. And so on and so forth.
I don't follow any of these fucking people! and I don't want to see this shit. It's absolutely soul-draining.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who'll say I'm using Twitter wrong, blah blah, whatever. I don't really care—all I know is I was enjoying using it in the way its UX encouraged me to use it and now it's horrible and I've stopped, probably for good. I do wonder how many others had/are having a similar experience.
And are you sure that you are "The average Twitter user" since I am not even sure what that really means.
people who dislike elon musk feel worse using musk's twitter, so their experience is probably objectively worse since he took over.
i really don't think it's much more deep than that.
I am salty about the Twitter API though
This doesn’t seem like a loss to me as I feel that kind of stuff isn’t only boring to me but kind of worse to have people so angry about politics. So this seems like a positive development to me if it’s now clearly just a right-wing echo chamber that people can now ignore.
I’m not a heavy user and haven’t noticed any changes really, but I never interacted with blue check mark people and always thought it was kind of a lame feature. And is still lame that people can pay for it.
I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from but if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it. You may not like to hear it, but Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal which then bankrolled the beginnings of SpaceX and Tesla, it wasn't from a rich daddy.
Funny you mention this as why he was self-made, where by all accounts he was considered an awful coder in this Paypal position, and was only able to be in the country (illegally) at the time, or secure this job, was because of his family's money and connections.
Because Musk's push came from no objective reason beyond he "didn't know it". The Board said "you're the CEO, you don't need to know all the technologies".
"...Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it’s at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix..."
"...I had this intern that I hired before the merger, and we thought, “We built all these cool Unix projects, but it’s kind of pointless now because they are going to scrap the platform. We might as well do something else.” So he and I decided we were going to find ourselves fun projects. We did one kind of mean project where we built a load tester package that would beat up on the Windows prototype (the next version was going to be in Windows). We built a load tester that would test against the Unix platform and the new Windows one and show in beautiful graphs that the Windows version had 1 percent of the scalability of the Unix one. “Do you really want to do that?”...
...It was me acting out, but it was kind of a low time for me because I was not happy with the way we were going..."
"...At the time, already I had hated the guy’s guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was like, “You gotta go, man.” My whole argument to him was, “We can’t switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can’t allow any additional changes. It’s one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don’t want to do it right now.” That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud...."
This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal. Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not?
I’m not a proponent of Musk but this seems like odd shade to throw on him.
So, technically he was never the CEO of "PayPal", just the company that became PayPal, and he got himself fired by the boards of both the companies that turned into PayPal. He retained 11% ownership of PayPal and ended up making a decent amount of money from the EBay acquisition.
I sure I wish I was that incompetent.
It is objectively true that he was ceo of x.com and PayPal, but neither of those positions require coding skills.
I’m not defending Musk as a CEO or human or anything. I’m just curious why it matters to bring up people thought his coding sucked. Was he a good chef? Was he terrible at Mario Kart? Want to list off other random complaints as well?
He was an awful CEO of X (which is why he was forced out as CEO twice, and was never CEO of PayPal), too, which may be more to the point, and the successful product X named itself for after forcing himself out the second time was acquired (and was the occasion of his brief return) after Musk’s visions had failed.
> Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not?
It probably wouldn’t, if he didn’t spend his time as CEO trying to do some other job instead. It’s not always bad if your CEO is doing some other role as well as being CEO, but its a doubly bad thing if they are doing some other role and they are a poor choice for the other job.
He started X.com which was an online payments company. Later, X.com and Confinity Inc, would merge and rename themselves Paypal.
Musk's tenure in the newly merged company consisted of complaining incessently that he didn't like/know Solaris and Java so the working POC/prototype should be thrown away and rebuilt in Windows/ASP, for four months until the board had enough and terminated him as CEO.
Goddamn the man hasn't changed one iota in twenty years.
I've heard it claimed hundreds of times but with no clear idea what these connections were, how they came about or what they were used for. Or even any evidence whatsoever that they existed...
The reality is that he is from a wealthy, well-connected, post-apartheid white family. They funded his coming to Canada, the US, University, and getting first business off the ground. The reality is that he has had a silver spoon his entire life.
I don't want read between the lines, but it's hard not to think it's a way for people to feel better about their own accomplishments by saying someone else had a massive head start.
Whether others do or don't, we should all be trying our best, be grateful for what we have, and proud of where we came from.
The money did come from something unethical--his family was enriched by segregation; racism; apartheid. That emerald money is dirty and is likely a key reason why Elon would deny its existence.
This brings us to the second thing: Elon lying about this. He has demonstrated that he is willing to lie about something this significant, which should do real damage to his credibility and trustworthiness if we are being logical and objective. What else is he willing to lie about?
And Elon was misleading and disingenuous but could still make a case that he hasn't explicitly lied on these things.
Ahhh, those historic pillars of morals and ethics, sub-Saharan Africa precious stone mines...
Having your father pay for Wharton Business School isn't the same thing as having your father pay for the College of New Jersey.
Median American household income is $70k before taxes. Do you think this household can afford college tuition and expenses?
It’s fair to say Elon’s family wasn’t poor. But the level of support he got wasn’t any more than the typical journalist who is criticizing him.
Also it's insane to compare Elon's family with a Journalist. Elon's father invested $200k for 10% in his first venture while half the journalist earn less than 50k. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/reporters-co...
Journalism at the national level is extremely competitive, and draws from a highly credentialed talent pool. The reason people with such credentials pursue such a low paying job is because their families are often quite affluent—they are often doctors, lawyers, etc.
Ordinary people make about 35k per year, half make less. They're not paying for an expensive college education.
This. Parents have worked their tails off to build a better life for their kids for millenia. Calling it a form of privilege seems like a gross misunderstanding of human behavior.
University is far more expensive today than back then, too. Ironically this supports your point in Elon’s case, but today it’s very much not a given that parents can even minimally help their kids get through college. My wife’s couldn’t.
Do you sense the pattern? It would be as if Paris Hilton went around repeatedly saying she was dirt poor and used her galaxy sized brain to start her own business without any help. People would, obviously and quite reasonably, mock it for its absurdity. Yet when the same happens to Elon Musk, there are endless hysterical defenses ready. As if you are telling a child that Santa isn't real.
There is no evidence his family was wealthy by American standards. Errol has claimed in the interview with the Sun to have helped his sons at uni to the tune of $115k and gave them a $28k loan (as part of a $200k round of seed funding) for their first business. The only sources on the emerald mine are the Musks, where the claim is they acquired a share of an informal mine by trading in a small plane they owned (likely a $70k Cessna). Errol Musk went bust in the 90s and there's no evidence of any other family wealth flowing to Elon.
There is no evidence they had any useful connections to speak of and no evidence any family gave more than a fraction of his uni (half of $115k) and business ($28k) funding.
People endlessly repeat random rumors they've heard which grow in the telling. People should go read the original sources wherever possible, such as the Sun article: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22104496/elon-musks-dad-errol-...
> Errol went as far as to say that emerald money paid for his son's move to the US, where Elon would go on to attend the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School on scholarship — with, apparently, emerald-generated cash in his pocket for living expenses.
https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine
> when he badly needed money at the beginning of Tesla and SpaceX there was certainly no secret backup of "Emerald Mine" money
That's not personal wealth, that's company investment. Just because you (or your family) doesn't have spare money kicking around to finance a space rocket company doesn't mean that you're not personally rich and able to pay for things "regular" folks cannot and have connections they don't.
529s are a fucking scam.
So if you call your advisor, and say "i want my 529 to only focus on X" they tell you that you have no control over the index and the plan will be the most conservative 50-year-old actuary data which has no fucking clue where the market is heading and then berate you for when their 529 index loses value...
I was ready to pay that investment banker's family a personal visit with skills that I have accumulated over a number of decades.
Perhaps the scam is when banks let people choose their own investments rather than have it be fully managed.
And so the account ended up continually ending up in the hands of even seedier banksters....
I didnt discover this until after my grandmother passed, and I was able to trace it back through various funds - and they just raped the account...
I agree that not all 529s are good, only 2 plans received a gold rating from Morningstar in 2022: Utah & Michigan. I wouldn't choose anything other than those.
"You're trying to tell me Musk's family is rich? He couldn't even pay for SpaceX himself, how could he be rich?!"
"I've put away some cash for my child to go to college, are you saying I'm as rich as Elon Musk?!"
It's all just so ridiculous. A lot of people here seem convinced that there are only two arguments to be made: that Musk is a spoiled trust fund baby that deserves no credit for everything, or that Musk was a hard-scrabble self-starter that did everything on his own. Maybe, just maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle?
@deelowe points out that they're also saving to fund their child's expenses in college.
Therefore, you're either suggesting that @deelowe has family wealth or you're arguing in bad faith.
The post I replied to said:
> I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from but if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it.
My reply clarified that there was indeed an emerald mine (according to Musk's father) and that it paid for his college living expenses. I then went on to say that an inability to pay for SpaceX does not mean you are "not rich".
> you're either suggesting that @deelowe has family wealth or you're arguing in bad faith.
But that's silly too. With no numbers attached "family wealth" doesn't mean anything. Almost all families have "family wealth", if anything the bad faith argument here is trying to suggest that all wealth is somehow equal.
You'll note in my original reply I didn't even say that Elon's family was inordinately wealthy, just that the mine was real and that it paid for his college. Any "bad faith" on top of that is your own interpretation, not my words.
And yet so fascinating, and ubiquitous.
Human consciousness is a hell of a drug.
Full disclosure - my parents paid for a lot of my college expenses. At least half of the people who go to Ivy leagues have parents that will pay for their college expenses. It’s almost entirely, if not completely irrelevant to his work at PayPal, the founding of SpaceX, and the building of Tesla.
So it’s baffling (to me, at least) that it keeps getting brought up as a reason to hate Elon Musk. It feels that people want to find reasons to deeply hate this person, and they through anything they possibly can against him, nonsensical or not.
But at no point was I making that argument. The OP suggested (as Musk has many times) that the mine literally didn't exist. I was simply pointing out that according to his father it very much did exist and paid for Elon's college.
Someone with an ownership stake in a mine that produces material with a variety of industrial and commercial uses is not necessarily rich. But that person is in a relatively tiny group compared to the group containing all parents who are able to contribute to their children's educational expenses. And the "owns <part of> a mine" group's average net worth is probably a fair bit higher than that of the "can contribute to the kid's college" group.
Hence, if you own an emerald mine, you might be rich.
I don't think anyone is suggesting elon musk rose from being a homeless person to a billionaire. I guess this internet dispute is whether he made his own money, or inherieted it (e.g. like trump). Whether or not his parents owned an emerald mine doesn't really shed much light on that debate. Its entirely possible they were moderately wealthy but the emerald mine wasn't super lucrative and musk still made money mostly by means of his own combination of skill and luck.
"I will pay a million Dogecoin for proof of this mine’s existence!" - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1646272562488569857
Musk's wealth is well documented. It comes from founding and selling a series of companies - not an emerald mine. Repeating the emerald mine meme is just a way to declare yourself a dishonest participant in the conversation - or perhaps you genuinely think you can fool people with obvious lies?
The Emerald mine denial was shady and dishonest, Elon probably thinking he can get away with it as "technically correct" because there was no actual mine that anyone can point to, just paying locals for any emeralds they have found lying around.
Elon seems about as self made as you can get in the USA, with the approximate amount of support you'd expect from an upper middle class family (helping pay for college and a small $28k business loan).
If he hadn't been given that, he might not have been in a position to sell Zip2 for a massive profit during the dotcom boom. That sale is what made Elon personally very wealthy.
Where did the $28k come from? How much money did Elon's dad provide for his living expenses, international moves, etc while going through college and the Zip2 startup? Where did that money come from?
> How much money did Elon's dad provide for his living expenses, international moves, etc while going through college and the Zip2 startup?
The Sun Errol interview answers that. About half of $115k (as he had to split it with his brother).
As for where the money came from, I believe Musk's father owned an engineering business. Or maybe it was profits from a share in an emerald mine - what does that matter though?
So, he has an unknown share of a mine of dubious value. "Trust me, that isn't cheap." I think you've done a very good job of explaining why people shouldn't trust you, because, unbothered by a lack of knowledge you are happy to leap to conclusions.
1 - https://www.the-sun.com/news/8014711/elon-musk-dad-errol-cha...
Interestingly, the intelligence level of the observer very often seems to have no effect. It's a very interesting phenomenon, I simply can't understand why humanity essentially ignores it.
According to Federal Reserve, only ~15% of American families directly hold any stock. We're not even talking about direct investments to a private company here and the % is already low. There seems to be an inability to determine direct relationship from Errol to mine owner (to justify a very low investment at an early stage), so using logic, Errol passed some figure needed to gain any access. Likely not as high as people assume, but also not the nothing you've been attempting to brand it as in this thread.
The reason I'm calling out your lack of integrity is because you're attempting to shift discussion away from Elon's inability to be honest as the focus is on his upbringing, and instead trying to make this about his current forms of wealth. The latter of which, is not what people are discussing. Certainly you understand how peculiar this is correct? Defending someone by shifting focus to another topic and calling those you disagree with disingenuous while you do the same is a very good indication this is no longer rational for you, it's purely emotional.
That someone might've marked up a couple emeralds Musk may have sold once (I believe the story is disputed) doesn't prove the quality of emeralds at the mine. Your point about Americans holding any stock is equally bizarre. "Directly" does a lot of work there, indirectly, it's closer to two thirds of American adults, so I'm not even sure what point you think you're making. Nobody, including Elon, disputes that his parents were relatively wealthy, so even if the 15% figure you're citing weren't misleading it would be irrelevant.
Your general pattern of argument here is to tell obvious lies and then, when confronted, to spin off on pointless digressions. Musk came from a relatively wealthy family - that was never disputed by anyone, Elon included, and it's obviously not the source of his present-day wealth. What I would like to return to is my original question of why you would do this? I mean, you understand this is totally transparent, right? I get why your politics or ideology might compel you to slander people you dislike, but why wouldn't you try to do a good job of it?
Musk’s parents helping with living expenses is actually the norm in America. Parents pay over 50% of the costs of tuition, room and board for American students: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-23/universit...
Here is his mother denying it: https://twitter.com/mayemusk/status/1654983542336520192
Here is Elon's story: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1654971702571331584
Here's a video of Elon back in the day on CNN talking about sleeping on the floor and buying his first expensive car with the money he was making from x.com and Justine Musk saying she fears they will become spoiled brats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9mczdODqzo
So who to believe?
Elon has obviously managed to create incredibly successful businesses. And he is also from an upper class background, which makes things easier, but hey, doesn't mean he isn't talented and that he worked really hard to get where he is.
Another thing that also seems pretty obvious is that he wants to hide his privileged background. Here is an archived interview from Forbes where he openly talks about his father's private plane and the emerald mine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140802011449/http://www.forbes...
I wouldn't call that lower middle class, not even upper middle.
"Errol Musk Claims He Visited Emerald Mine With Son Elon" - https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/after-elon-musks-strong-deni....
"Elon Musk’s dad Errol says he can ‘prove’ existence of emerald mine in new bombshell claim revealing its location" - https://www.the-sun.com/news/7911051/elon-musks-dad-errol-em...
This says that Errol claims he managed to give his two sons about $115k in total. Which makes sense given he got his Emerald mine share for less than that.
There's also literally zero evidence that Errol had any useful connections here.
It really irritates me how many myths float around because people cannot be bothered to go find the original sources...
I’d never claim to be anything other than upper middle class (even though my dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh and his elementary school had no walls). But at the same time, if I became a billionaire it would be extremely disingenuous to imply that it was the result of family wealth. This level of family wealth is mundane in top American schools. The journalists whining about Musk almost certainly had similar support from their parents.
For context, a doctor and lawyer family in a state capital will earn $2-3m per decade, which is MUCH more than any reasonable estimates of the Musk family's wealth or income.
According to Elon's dad, he was rich:
‘I drove them to school in a convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche, they had thoroughbred horses to ride and motorbikes at the age of 14. They were spoilt, I suppose. Maybe that’s why Elon is acting like a spoilt child now,’.
this is extremely common for young adults
I'm no fan of Musk, but I'm even less a fan of being intentionally misleading.
> You're correct that Musk isn't a "billionaire heir to an emerald mine"
There’s plenty to criticize Elon about, but this one’s a bit of a reach.
Umm... his father.
https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1611861409733967872?lan...
> This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia.
The call is coming from inside the house, Elmo.
Elon has -also- said that he and his family would stuff their pockets with money and stones that wouldn’t fit in the safe from overflowing.
What next? “I only said I did it, but I never actually saw myself doing it?”
At some point there is a recognition that (at least) one of two things is accurate: 1) that a mine exists, or 2) that Elon is a serial liar.
Also, “get a million dogecoin”… is that before or after he hires a PI to go into your background for a little light character assassination for making him look foolish?
Back in those days, emerald mines were literally the equivalent of present-day tech IPO money. And if you read his biography by Ashlee Vance, you'll find out how the family would take vacations and travel to places by private plane.
His dad invested $200k at 10% at a later stage. I'm pretty sure it qualifies as rich daddy. Source: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211064937004589056
Btw Musk had little to do with the success of X. The revenue of PayPal was merely $61 million at the time Musk was fired as CEO of X.com(later PayPal).
Elon was never going to have to eat rice and beans, or go work in a cubicle for a big corp to pay the bills if any of his ventures failed.
You're reading that wrong. Elon is claiming his dad invested 10% OF a $200k round of seed funding. The actual amount was $28k. (See wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2 )
Source - https://www.statista.com/statistics/782411/parental-income-o...
Median household income is $70k, so I'd expect you'd need to be upper middle class or quite good with money to loan $28k to your kids. I certainly won't argue that the Musks were poor, but there's a very big difference between "able to help their kids through college and loan $28k" and "silver spoon trust fund kids".
To which Elon contributed, AFAICT, money (both directly and in his ability to scare up capital), not management.
He was forced out as CEO of X when they had no product success, X bought the company that owned PayPal and briefly brought him back as CEO then forced him out against six months later, after which X renamed itself after its one successful product, which it had acquired.
You don't go to an American University as anything but a very rich African, or as a sponsorship. Source: I am a born African. I sure hope it was emerald money, else his father has some explaining to do to SARS.
Also, he claimed Twitter was losing millions per day and that's why he had to fire everyone, when in reality, the millions per day in loses were interest on the loan he'd used to buy Twitter. So he created the problem, and then blamed that. Pretty shocking.
Twitter didn't have this management layer, and we have now seen the result.
A family friend who works closely with Elon at SpaceX puts it like, "you have to make him believe that your technical conclusions and recommendations are actually his to have any hope of traction." Otherwise, even if you're proven right years later when Elon's strategy fails, he will hold you to task for, "not convincing him hard enough."
Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. Their business metrics were absolute crap for a business of their scale and in the pandemic environment.
The jury is still out if new Twitter has failed or not.
What metrics are you looking at? Pre-Musk Twitter didn't seem that badly run - it was profitable outside of a one-time court judgment.
If your mature social media site that’s been around for over a decade and has hundreds of millions of users has a 1% margin and effectively lost money in 2020, you’re not a well-run organization.
To give you an idea of their incompetence, when you create a Twitter Ads account, you’re asked to choose your time zone. I’m in UTC+5:30. Except you can’t choose half hour increments, so I was forced to choose UTC+5:00. All the data and reports had the time error.
My time zone is home to over 1.4 billion people.
If your billion dollar corporation that depends on ads can’t even be bothered to fix the time zone selection for 1/6th of the world’s population in its flagship product, its not a well-run business.
That's a lot harder to do with a giant debt crushing your soul, by a guy who can't really put any extra money into it to give it runway. All of the changes Elon has made to twitter have been desperate attempts to get some cash to stay alive, because the company is in a desperate position. At one point, they were down something like 50% in ad spend. Not many places can survive with new billions in debt and half the revenue. I don't know if he has been able to convince advertisers to come back, but they are fickle, stupid, and have no memory so surely that's a possibility, and this new CEO might be an attempt to convince advertisers his hands are off the wheel.
Tesla is relatively simple: you've got to make cool cars. They have to work and people have to want to buy them.
SpaceX is relatively simple: you've got to make rockets. They have to work, and be cheaper than the competition.
With Twitter it seems he doesn't understand that there's nothing to build really. The software's already there. Twitter's main job is purely social, trying to please a whole bunch of governments and advertising agencies, as well as understanding why people post there and how to make them post more. There's no straightforward technical test to it, it's a delicate social balancing problem, and one awfully ill-suited to Musk's typical "move fast and break things" approach.
Also, SpaceX deployed Starlink to provide guidance to (US provided) Ukrainian weapons. Field commanders said without it they wouldn't be in the fight. That sounds aligned with US foreign policy and statecraft to me.
They backpedaled after the use of the technology became so aggressive it would be reputationally damaging for starlink.
I would be interested in what cost/kg other providers are referencing.
"Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR."
>7% Federal appropriations via CPB
>7% Federal, state, and local governments
Source: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...
Furthermore, NPR was built by public funding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadca...
>Tesla and SpaceX get far more public money than NPR does.
And neither one is a media organization, so I'm not sure why that's even relevant.
Not to say Musk has been a little careless with his communication through all of this, but still, people want to sit in front of there computer and think they know better.
If everything goes south, It's on the Musk and company's tab anyway. So, en expensive drama to watch on some rich people's dime.
And yet the site still works and engagement is up.
>mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored,
BBC is state sponsored as long as they larp as an arm of the government with their fake “TV Licensing” arm with threats of government punishment for not paying. If they want to stop doing that then they can claim independence but while they use government powers and police to fund themselves through threats, they’re state sponsored.
Anyone who had stock in Twitter got a big pile of cash.
In his investors’ defense, Elon had a singular track record prior to Twitter. And his proposal to turn Twitter into X, aka US—based WeChat, was not a terrible one. It was an expensive investment, but there was a plausible positive outcome.
His complete and total bungling of it all would have been difficult to predict in advance based only on what was known then. He is seemingly oblivious to the unintended consequences and second order effects of both his actual decisions, and their rash and heavy-handed manner. It’s odd, and not surprising they forced a professional CEO on him.
100%
I think the stance on this issue greatly influences how one perceives changes at twitter.
i hope you someday find the happiness to stop micro-observing everything about what elon is doing in his day to day life
Which one of those claims wasn't real?
"turned blue-check validation into a living nightmare for international brands" <- brands now have yellow checks
"mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored" <- all the ones with that label that I'm aware of have state funding
elon's a great guy who does amazing work, and twitter is booming, making more money than ever even
Booming with cat and dog torture videos?
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cat-dog-torture-video...
his big score was PayPal, and it seeded what followed. Tesla and SpaceX very early almost wrecked him financially
we can criticize his Twitter shenanigans. but he's clearly a workaholic, highly effective, and helped put humanity in a better place (via SpaceX and Tesla, anyway
Have Musks changes have been net positive or negative? No shortage of internet opinion on that Q. Regardless of one’s personal feelings on it, it seems hard to dispute that Twitter moves faster than before. I consider that no small feat given how much legacy code and bureaucracy the company had at the time of his acquisition.
If he can free more of his time by making this hire, I am looking forward to seeing whether that translates to even faster iteration times. pg and all the others I followed are still there, so still plenty of potential to create quality entertainment/learning w less regret than Facebook
Rumor has it they lacked the manpower to actually keep the API running and it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired.
Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. In a few week Twitter lost half of it's top 100 biggest advertisers [0] and it doesn't seem they are coming back.
What's crazy to think about is that, despite being "bloated" Twitter managed to have profitable quarters pre-acquisition.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert...
I hope she has an infinite supply of lipstick because this pig will need it :|
Just saying it doesn't make it true. Twitter has a long way to go to regain advertiser confidence, and Blue is barely a footnote.
There should have been a migration path from legacy to new verified, but instead they just unverified everyone (including obviously government accounts that under the new rule should retain a grey check).
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35920114.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
None of the boo vs. yay wars that plague this topic are interesting; it's really just "I feel boo" and "I feel yay". We're trying for something else here.
If not who is really the CEO?
How much unambiguous proof does he need to provide before all people realize his stated mission is not his actual mission?
Can you elaborate on this? How is the WEF tied to global censorship?
> The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon of women being likelier than men to achieve leadership roles, such as executives in the corporate world and political election candidates, during periods of crisis or downturn, when the risk of failure is highest.
Twitter is a private corporation and therefore has no legal obligation to provide nor promote "free speech." To imply that it has this authority is to flatter it, over-state its power, and misrepresent it as having any interest in or obligation to the US Constitution, which it clearly does not.
That said, prior to Musk, the Twitter owners/leaders behaved terribly by "de-platforming" voices and sources of information. In so doing they debased themselves, demonstrating that they have no moral compass and demolishing what little trust there was in the technocracy and its faux institutions.
Musk claims to intend to restore "trust" in Twitter (I guess for those naive bubble people who obediently believe everything they read on the Internet). I could care less if he means what he says.
But Musk's stated positive mission is there for all to witness. So I don't get why he's being pilloried for it. What's all the clamor about? Just another stage-play from the Drama Dept, I imagine.