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Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

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Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#711

Post by martin_a »

deanCommie wrote: post #690
fleddr wrote: post #678

I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter. Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. User growth is stagnating…

Counterpoint: Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas big and small - CEOs and random Joes. It's where memes are born and proliferate everywhere else (other than TikTok). Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Facebook got ruined because it thought everyone's parents and grandparents should be on it, and now that's the only people on it. My parents…

> If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth.

Stakeholders will think otherwise.

> An edit button by the way would RUIN it because people who have gone viral with a bad take would simply edit it away.

Just add a change history like (I think) FB has. No big deal.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#712

Post by drooby »

boc wrote: post #652
blueflow wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is he doing like, bad things, or this is the regular everyday "racism" name-calling again? I'm having a "The boy who cried wolf" moment right now.

Normally I'd agree, but his father made his fortune from emerald mining in apartheid South Africa. Elon went to an all-white prep school that explicitly didn't allow black students. There's a pretty high chance that Elon was raised in a household that may not have been amazing on the whole racism front.

This is probably not accurate.

https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/errol-musk-elon-f...

Looks like his fathers background is actually hard to pin down. A biographer of Musk believes his father made most of his wealth from his engineering business.

> Elon was born on June 28, 1971, to Errol and his wife Maye Musk when they were both in their 20s. This is important because the parents divorced in 1979, nine years after getting married, and it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that the emerald mine in question came into the picture.

> The family owned one of the biggest houses in Pretoria thanks to the success of Errol’s engineering business,” a business that included “large projects such as office buildings, retail complexes, residential subdivisions, and an air force base.” Elon even admitted his father is “brilliant at engineering” despite being an overall “terrible human being.”

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#713

Post by [deleted] »

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #656
NelsonMinar wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's remarkable how all the replies to my message here completely ignore the comments in the articles made by actual Tesla employees who've been victims of racism.

People can’t escape their ideologies. This website is as tribal as anywhere else (actually, honestly worse than the median). Accepting that Tesla fosters and promotes a racist work environment is unthinkable for ideologues of a certain stripe.

[deleted]

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#714

Post by fleddr »

PostOnce wrote: post #698
fleddr wrote: post #678

I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter. Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. User growth is stagnating…

"stagnant company" Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers. Twitter does what it does and people like it (as seen by the fact that they all use it), yet armchair generals cry out that twitter's refusal to turn into "not twitter" is somehow a failure of engineering and management, or some form of incompetence. So, I disagree, I guess.

I get what you're saying from a moral point of view, but we live in the real world.

In the real world, Twitter is a public company. It has existed for a long time and has barely every made a penny. It fails in comparison to other high growth networks (Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube).

And it's not an armchair comment. Twitter's own PMs have openly admitted to some of its flaws, it's failure to appeal to the masses. They're self-aware about their own incompetence.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#715

Post by ejb999 »

deanCommie wrote: post #690
fleddr wrote: post #678

I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter. Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. User growth is stagnating…

Counterpoint: Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas big and small - CEOs and random Joes. It's where memes are born and proliferate everywhere else (other than TikTok). Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Facebook got ruined because it thought everyone's parents and grandparents should be on it, and now that's the only people on it. My parents…

>>Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas

If you think you are getting 'unfiltered balance' from twitter, then you don't know twitter very well.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#716

Post by fleddr »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #694
KerrAvon wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed. Whatever merit or lack thereof Musk on the Twitter board has, I would bet money this particular scenario does not happen. Musk is not a turnaround expert or corporate savior (and for the record he's not claiming to be).

Yeah, I was thinking exactly that. Assuming that this is the case - that Musk is joining as a savior - is silly. He doesn't fit the profile nor has the track record for that. He may be a visionary (whatever that means), but a excellent, renowned executive that revitalizes companies, heck, that really has never been the case.

Strange that both of you would say that. He's a ruthless result-driven executive that doesn't accept excuses. If it's at all impossible for something to get done, he'll get it done.

I'm not at all a fan of him, but his power is in execution. A vision is worthless.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#717

Post by fleddr »

orblivion wrote: post #691
fleddr wrote: post #678

I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter. Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. User growth is stagnating…

Why would Elon Musk spend his capacity to get things done on something like Twitter? He's got planets to colonize. Interesting point to question his motives, but for now I take him at his word regarding the free speech thing. I guess it could be something more nefarious as well.

Like I said, prestige.

When you're the richest man in the world, and your main companies are on track, what is it that motivates billionaires?

Prestige. Visibility. Legacy.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#718

Post by bliteben »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #651
cbozeman wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Majority of Americans (and most people I'd imagine) do not really care about their policies. They don't give two figs about it, and just go about their life just fine without being affected by it one bit. That's the problem with not giving a shit. When things finally do become bad enough that it affects you personally, it's too late. When it comes to standing up for what's right - and I define what's "right" as mos…

I can't even imagine how the Founders would react to things like the PATRIOT Act. I can't even take this seriously. These are the same folks that kept people as property. Didn't make sure everyone could vote (male land owners only). They founded the country on land stolen from folks already living here. It isn't like the founders were really beacons of freedom, at least not if you use today's standards and honestly,…

Imagine being born into several flawed systems, risking everything, and many had a lot to risk to fix one aspect of a system and being judged because you didn't fix everything. You act like the founding fathers created slavery on their own. The freedom given to the world by the US and by extension Napoleon was not some inevitable thing and its not something that will necessarily persist either as we can easily judge from mankind's very limited written history.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#719

Post by [deleted] »

ejb999 wrote: post #715
deanCommie wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas big and small - CEOs and random Joes. It's where memes are born and proliferate everywhere else (other than TikTok). Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Facebook got ruined because it thought everyone's parents and grandparents should be on it, and now that's the only people on it. My parents…

>>Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas If you think you are getting 'unfiltered balance' from twitter, then you don't know twitter very well.

[deleted]
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