321–330 of 757 posts
The plan is damage control to save Tesla’s spiral. Investors are clamoring the board to do something.
It's instructive to contrast what other billionaires did with media properties they owned: - Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone and let the editors run it. What Jeff did do was invest some money into the IT department to modernize the workflow tools (metrics dashboards, etc) for journalists. He stayed out of the decisions of what stories get run on the front page. - Rupert Murdoch owns…
That didn't pan out too well either.
https://i.redd.it/manager-does-a-little-code-cleanup-v0-5cxg...
If I vote yes, do I get banned later? Is he going to leave and then blame/rewrite history to make it looks like the new leader is at fault? I'm afraid to post anything to the platform for fear of losing my account and premium handle to a ban from an insane leader.
He's realised it's not in his best interests to be there, but can't mentally tolerate the idea of supporters thinking he's quitting or there against his will. Which is why I think he frames these decisions as a vote. If the vote doesn't go the way he wants, he'll try it again later, come up with another reason or whatever. It's easier to ascribe blame for something that goes wrong if it was a popular vote rather than…
Another outcome is to install a puppet and blame them a la Bob Iger.
I think he's too opinionated to salvage this, even as a puppetmaster. He would need an exceptionally strong appointee and an ability to keep his hands off and mouth controlled - I don't think he can do that.
Let's not forget that it's 3 in the morning Qatar time after an insane World Cup that Elon was live tweeting from the stands. Definitely adds some flavor to this!
A bunch of his saddest posts have been in the early hours of the morning, like 1-4am. He seems to have a pattern of getting really upset about something and then Posting Through It, and it reminds me in a really sad way of how some of my most troubled friends always feel worst after midnight. It sucks to see people with near-limitless resources just sit and wallow in (self-inflicted) misery when they could probably d…
I'll never understand how he doesn't buy half of Bora Bora and occasionally go for a zero-g joy ride in a Dragon capsule. Instead he opts to self-flaggelate on Twitter.
It's instructive to contrast what other billionaires did with media properties they owned: - Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone and let the editors run it. What Jeff did do was invest some money into the IT department to modernize the workflow tools (metrics dashboards, etc) for journalists. He stayed out of the decisions of what stories get run on the front page. - Rupert Murdoch owns…
> What tech people like Paul Graham and others were hoping was for Elon to apply his scientific first principles type of thinking that he demonstrated previously at SpaceX+Tesla to Twitter. I wish one could take a step back and just see how ridiculous of a statement this is. There is nothing about Musk’s history and management style that is even remotely close to what could be called “scientific first principles type…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You aren't wrong in some senses, but I think you're wrong in the most important sense: Twitter's servers run on electricity, and electricity is paid for with ads and MAUs, not outrage on HN (and other tech forums).
Servers are not that expensive, especially not when people are going to Twitter because they are outraged and seeing all the ads, and others are paying $8 per month. Whether or not that works out is not something I can predict, but having more user engagement than ever before is not a bad thing for a platform that makes literally every penny from exploiting user engagement in some way.
I would say that 95% of my professional circle was on Twitter 3 months ago. Today, it feels like less than 50%. Of that same circle, I only know one who paid $8 for Twitter Blue, and he canceled this month.
Outrage-driven engagement is definitely happening. But it needs to happen on Twitter, and in a way that doesn't threaten Twitter's ad sales, for it to be of any value to Twitter.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/technology/elon-musk-twit...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't even think he's doing it on purpose, I think he's completely in over his head. Someone referred to Elon as "speedrunning being a forum moderator", or "running a Lowtax" and yeah, so far.
> The "this is a forum mod meltdown, at scale" joke keeps popping up because it's not a joke — it's recognizing a persistent pattern in bad governance of a mediated social space. https://twitter.com/eaton/status/1604632585849765889
I think he only posts polls when he believes he knows the outcome already. Yesterday he posted a poll about unsuspending the journalist accounts and when the outcome wasn't what he wanted instead of following the majority vote he posted it again with different options (with the same result, which he did abide by the second time). I think this indicates he's tired of Twitter already. But he still owns it, so who will…
