He grew up with freedom of speech in apartheid South Africa?
I feel like this response deliberately avoids the point I was making, in favor of kicking up confusion. He grew up on the internet. At a time when everyone was turning their internet web pages black to protest censorship. At a time when "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" was a slogan touted proudly by technologists and philosophers. It's not Elon Musk that changed, it seems to me. It'…
> He grew up on the internet
Elon Musk was born in 1971. He grew up on television.
It’s sort of like saying Amazon is a delivery company. It’s part of a division of their company, and a main component at that. But it’s not like SREs working at AWS know or care about logistics.
I don't really understand the parallel. It's not like software engineers at Bloomberg really know or care all that much about finance. The vast majority just work on the software product that moves financial information.
The parallel is to say Bloomberg journalists are tech experts because “it’s a tech company”. The journalists are just journalists
Unlike everyone else here apparently, I find his attitude pretty positive. You all act as if you would have know what twitter would become from the beginning and you would have done better, I've been in infinitesimally smaller projects with pressures that have nothing to do with building Twitter and still I thought like I was losing control of the direction the product was going.
Same, I also thought this was a positive conversation and I'm not sure why folks are interpreting it otherwise.
I'm interpreting it otherwise because the conversation is superficial to the point of being meaningless. Akin to "hey I have an idea, why don't we make it better?" "That's a great idea, how do we make it better?" "Well let's improve some aspects" "Super interesting idea!"
> I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes Sounds like every other billionaire who once they have one foot in the grave rediscover themselves as philanthropists... You can't fix it Jack, you fucked it up big time and shitting out yet another platform won't ever make it better
> one foot in the grave Dude is 45 and healthy - ageist much?
Call it a middle-age crises if you prefer. Disbelieving that in all likelihood, this really is as good as it gets.
Well they weren't performatively texting. I believe the critique is the comical level of hubris between these two.
Not trying to be arch or reductive. I'm not fond of either of these men. But... haven't they pretty much demonstrated that they do the things that would be considered hubris in others?
There is no solution for fixing web communication that doesn't involve uploading your ID every time you post something. The internet was, is and always will be a cesspool. It comes with anonimity and plausible deniability.
Ironic that you write this comment on hacker news
I don't think so at all. He's posting it here because it's one of the few places remaining on the internet free of advertising and outside bias (mostly)
Unlike everyone else here apparently, I find his attitude pretty positive. You all act as if you would have know what twitter would become from the beginning and you would have done better, I've been in infinitesimally smaller projects with pressures that have nothing to do with building Twitter and still I thought like I was losing control of the direction the product was going.
Same, I also thought this was a positive conversation and I'm not sure why folks are interpreting it otherwise.
> I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes Sounds like every other billionaire who once they have one foot in the grave rediscover themselves as philanthropists... You can't fix it Jack, you fucked it up big time and shitting out yet another platform won't ever make it better
>Sounds like every other billionaire who once they have one foot in the grave rediscover themselves as philanthropists...
It's certainly a profound statement you make. But the world isn't entirely kind to the ones that start out as philanthropists either.
I have to admit this is a bit surprising from Musk. I was pretty firmly of the theory that his real motive re Twitter was basically narcissism, and I'm still not sure that's wrong. I note he's not agreeing strongly with Dorsey, with the strongest phrase being "I'd like to help if I can". And I still think he would be better off using any money he might have spent buying Twitter on funding a handful of open source com…
>I was pretty firmly of the theory that his real motive re Twitter was basically narcissism, and I'm still not sure that's wrong. Why is it so hard to believe that Musk genuinely believes in exactly the version of "freedom of speech" that everyone in his generation grew up with, that served as the impetus for much of the internet's creation, etc.?
It seems like a lot of people (Rogan, the Thiel guys, Calcanis) are coming to him talking about free speech, and he kind of nods along, but I didn't really see anything that demonstrated his own passion for the topic. He seems primarily motivated by a belief that Twitter is poorly run as a business, and that it will be difficult or impossible to turn it around as a public company.