71–80 of 348 posts
Elon is already at the limits of his hours on a daily basis to devote to things with SpaceX, Boring Company, Tesla, etc.
Picture it this way, Twitter is your startup and Elon proposes to buy you out. Would you not question how much time we would devote as part of the buyout talks?
The cost to code and market a Twitter clone would be a tiny fraction of $45b. If the existing Twitter is so bad that Elon needs to buy it and save it, then the value of the userbase is low - particulary considering that the time cost for a user to switch is much lower than say a Myspace to FB shift. I am assuming that Elon is not this much of a dumbass - what am I missing here?
Twitter's userbase is immensely valuable, but the company's execution has both been slow to unlock its full potential and also is on a fairly clear trajectory of eroding the window of permissible speech on the platform which presents grave risks to society at large. For an activist investor of the right type, the former checks the box of financial opportunity, and the latter checks the box of impact opportunity.
I really feel like a lot of you guys vastly overestimate the impact of Twitter on The Real World. Elon Musk included.
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Nowhere in the emails do the Saudi investors pledge funding. At best, they say they might be interested in investing. Therefore, "funding secured " was absolutely an outright lie, unless words don't have meaning anymore.
It’s much worse than that. I had previously assumed Musk knew what he was doing and was fooling around on Twitter in an effort to (unethically) crush short sellers. Now it appears like he’s an utterly inept businessman who took the first verbal sign of interest, rushed it to Twitter as though the deal was complete, and then blew up the deal in a hissy fit. I still think what he’s done at SpaceX and Tesla is admirable…
And actually he's not a "businessman" at all. He's an engineer at heart. "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.
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How is he 'unstable' exactly? He has been leading successful companies for 30 years and pretty much every company he has been involved in has been highly successful. He has never been unstable, just opinionated. And people don't like that so they call him psychologically unstable instead. What he has done that is bad and why people hate him: - Called somebody something bad on twitter once. - Twits dumb memes with dum…
> Called somebody something bad on twitter once I assume you're talking about the time he called a diver (and actual hero) a pedophile. It went a bit further than that - he hired a private investigator who tried (and failed) to dig up dirt on the man.
He created a false narrative about what Musk and his team of engineers (literal rocket engineers) were doing. Musk and his engineers had coordinated with the actual rescue team and the Mini-Sub they build was according to specification from the diving team who suggested they were not sure if the youngest and smallest child could be rescued with the conventional method they were planning.
The media of course presented this as Musk comes in and advocates for his own method of saving everybody and the 'hero' was a guy who pushed himself into the cheap sensationalist media by attacking Musk. The sensationalist media of course simply ran with that and were just to happy to publish anything negative about Musk.
That was of course during a time when Tesla was having challenges scaling and the 'Musk is a total idiot' storyline was getting lots of clicks.
In all, sure, Musk did something stupid but he didn't start it. He had never said anything bad about either this guy or the diving team. He had in fact done the opposite and expressed that it was good that their alternative solution in the end wasn't required.
But I guess anybody who pushes himself into the media who to insult Musk must be a hero.
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Internal chat between Musk and the Saudi investors just popped up on my twitter feed https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1518353213283442688 Doesn't seem like the funding secured thing was an outright lie.
Nowhere in the emails do the Saudi investors pledge funding. At best, they say they might be interested in investing. Therefore, "funding secured " was absolutely an outright lie, unless words don't have meaning anymore.
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Anyone who doesn't fall in line and support the "current thing" is labeled a far-right extremist these days. Ironically, they do this even to people with traditionally liberal views like free speech being a good thing, like Elon in this case.
>Anyone who doesn't fall in line and support the "current thing" is labeled a far-right extremist these days. I Support The Current Thing 5 words that drive the Twitterati nuts because it encapsulates their whole online existence.
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Really hard to imagine the richest and most accomplished dude on the planet not being able to secure funding. Somehow people still think he’s just a showman. At some point in time, accomplishments can’t be explained away
Accomplished? He's got money and hired some smart people. And tech media is more than happy to ignore all the stupid shit he's done and tried.
Even if you want to go with the idiotic 'he is not an engineer'-storyline to make yourself feel good, as a business man his credentials are literally unassailable.
To downplay business success as 'hired some smart people' is just ridiculous and utterly sad and depressing to read on a page that is hosted on 'ycombinator'. Get a grip and think before you write something.
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Seems a little dramatic to delete your account, don't you think?
It really depends on if he follows through on what he is proposing, which seems to be to allow for disinformation and hate speech. If that turns out to not be the case, then I might reconsider.
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> Called somebody something bad on twitter once I assume you're talking about the time he called a diver (and actual hero) a pedophile. It went a bit further than that - he hired a private investigator who tried (and failed) to dig up dirt on the man.
The diver was not a hero. He was an somebody that himself did little, and pushed himself into the media where he actually started insulting Musk and his team. He created a false narrative about what Musk and his team of engineers (literal rocket engineers) were doing. Musk and his engineers had coordinated with the actual rescue team and the Mini-Sub they build was according to specification from the diving team who…
If you don't want to consider a man who was instrumental in saving the lives of 12 boys a hero that's fine, there are lots of other adjectives that I'm sure you can find and they're all far more flattering than the one Musk made of himself in that saga.
Take a step back and think about what you're defending here. It's not a good look.
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He’s not just a showman, but he is a showman. And it’s not like you have to dig back into ancient history to find instances where he invented a bid like this, he basically made up a bid for Tesla a few years ago and lied about having secured financing.
He's never been a showman. It's a ridiculous internet myth that thinks that he is. Anyone who says he's a showman really has no understanding of the guy and hasn't looked at what he's said outside of the stuff he's put on twitter. Listen to his speeches, and not the one where it's some bland interviewer that constantly interrupts him.
Even though there's a bunch of people (including Carmack) that claim that he's a great engineer, it's really hard to believe when he's put out stuff like this. Like, did he use up all of his thinking fuel on designing rockets that he didn't understand why the boring company's mission was a total non-starter?