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Never bet against Elon. Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could. If you don’t see the potential for Twitter. That’s fine. But don’t write an

• paulpauper 4y ago
  yeah, many hedge funds and individuals have lost serious $ betting against tesla
  • cma 4y ago
    Don't bet against him getting away with scamming. And don't bet against politicians wanting to affiliate with his celebrity/interact with his clout giving him subsidies.
    • dymk 4y ago
      Yeah, all those Teslas which deffo weren’t sold, what a scam
      • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        Are you saying the Tesla valuation is only due to the cars that have been sold?
        • dymk 4y ago
          I'm saying where's the scam?
      • jjeaff 4y ago
        Those that paid $10k+ for full self driving got at least partially scammed.
  • lemondrink 4y ago
    YTD $TSLA is down 44%.
  • candiddevmike 4y ago
    In some of those cases, they lost due to unpunished securities fraud though? Tesla should be a fraction of it's valuation. Short selling is an important part of price discovery and attempts to curtail it should be punished IMO.
  • tenpies 4y ago
    And many more have made an absolute fortune. Down more than 40% this YTD, even worst if you go from ATH to current prices. It's also been a trader's paradise given the volatility and occasional appearance of someone mysteriously placing huge OTM call purchases for that Friday in an effort to force a gamma squeeze. In a market with regulators this would be suspicious and investigated, but we're in post-GFC America.
    • paulpauper 4y ago
      which Friday, which options
• kbenson 4y ago
  > That’s like someone who has no idea how to cook leaving a bad review for food they could never hope to improve on. I agree it's like that but disagree there's a problem with that. Ultimately it's the consumers that are the judges if it's a business.
• everdrive 4y ago
  > That’s like someone who has no idea how to cook leaving a bad review for food they could never hope to improve on Ignoring the context of the article, I don’t believe that the example you’ve given here is really fair. It’s perfectly valid to review something which you could not create. If we excluded that whole category, then reviews would mostly cease to exist, and only peer review would be possible.
  • nelsonic 4y ago
    Totally agree! Peer review is the only valid feedback in many situations. You don’t see many ultra-successful serial entrepreneurs doubting on Elon! You see many of them driving Teslas. As someone who has been in the kitchen since childhood, I can appreciate how difficult great food is to create! If I taste something inferior I’m going to be specific with my feedback for improvement, highlighting the good points not just focus on the negatives. Drives me nuts when at a restaurant with friends/family who haven’t put in the time in the kitchen and couldn’t hope to create a delicious meal dissing the food … if you can’t make something better, either shut up or try to be helpful with your feedback! Being critical is so easy and cliché. The world needs more optimistic Elons not more doubters.
    • TheDudeMan 4y ago
      > Totally agree! Um, your response is not agreement.
    • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      I can't make a cell phone, so if my new cell phone constantly drops calls I'm not allowed to say it's a bad cell phone?
      • filoleg 4y ago
        You can, because your feedback is constructive and specific. If you said "idk, this phone just sucks, because i feel like it does and idk how it could be made better", that would fall under "useless complaints". But saying "my phone drops calls often" is a specific complaint with a very specific (implied) improvement suggestion ("make phone not drop calls").
• yladiz 4y ago
  Your argument falls apart here, since you can review food without being able to cook said food. For example, you don't need to know how to cook to know that something is burnt and therefore critique it based on that. What you're really arguing here that Elon Musk is more capable than the previous people in charge of Twitter. I won't defend them much, but based on many of his previous actions I'm skeptical he's going to do any better and in fact think he'll probably do worse than the ex-leadership.
• Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
  > Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet. Starlink is yet another niche thing which Musk is specialized in pursuing. In fact all of Musck companies can be summarized with "everybody has heard of them in the financial and technology press, but not many people use them"
  • jjeaff 4y ago
    The rural market, RV market, boating market will always be an enormous niche. But fiber and other broadband tech like 5g wireless may win out in the long or mid term. Leaving only the very secluded rural market. I would not have guessed that the satellite tv market would have gone on as long as it has, considering how many satellite customers also have access to cable. And yet, you can drive through any suburb and find plenty of dishes.
    • zirgs 4y ago
      Mobile internet is already available pretty much everywhere. Not that many people need internet access in the middle of the ocean.
  • Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet. Fiber may be way better, but putting a glorified wifi router on top of a million dollars worth of kerosene and stainless steel is a great deal cheaper than digging a 1000km long trench. There aren't many of them compared to the people in cities, but being able to serve the billion or so people that would have to pay hundreds a month for crappy microwave internet with somewhat less crappy space microwave internet sounds like a the one company he's running that isn't fleecing the taxpayers or investors.
    • Ekaros 4y ago
      Is the population outside areas that could reasonably be served by mobile connections really a billion? A few hundred people around should already be enough for a single tower.
• xiphias2 4y ago
  Media has been going totally in the left direction after Trump won. I don't really like him, but cancelling people exactly at the same time by all media companies shows that it's all controlled by a few people. Of course they try everything to say bad things about Elon now...it's funny to see actually.
  • rospaya 4y ago
    Love to see somebody use the word cancelled, because it means absolutely nothing. Louie CK jerked off in front of women, got cancelled and got a Grammy last year. He's still wealthy and does shows. So is Kanye. Cancelling doesn't mean shit.
    • muaytimbo 4y ago
      Ye got his deals with Adidas (and others) cancelled and Louie CK got a Netflix show and comedy tour cancelled. In both of your own examples "shit" happened.
      • rospaya 4y ago
        Both still have profitable businesses and communication channels. Both are celebrities that still have large fanbases. If and when they end up poor and forgotten, then they'll be canceled, now they just lost the privilege of being promoted via some media channels. I'm having a hard time defending wealth people who lost a Twitter account because they acted like dicks. Some of them literally.
        • xiphias2 4y ago
          There are certain swimmers who acted not too fairly in a swimming competition, but Twitter management was defending that person. I have no problem with that as it's all politics, I just prefer not having the same political side in all media.
        • muaytimbo 4y ago
          There's a vast difference between defending them and saying their actions had no consequences. You seem to think that since they are not immediately forgotten, disowned by the public and de-celebrityfied, and plunged into poverty that nothing happened. That's not true, their actions did have consequences. You can not defend them while also acknowledging something did, in fact, happen when they were cancelled.
• runjake 4y ago
  Nilay's job is to generate revenue for The Verge and it's shareholders. You generate revenue by increasing ad views. You can increase ad revenue with controversial hot takes with saucy language. Nilay is doing the exact right thing, in the context of his corporate job.
• jayd16 4y ago
  What if I bet his lawsuit would fail and he would be forced to buy Twitter?
• beej71 4y ago
  The thrust of the article is that buying Twitter only damages Musk. And the way to make it better would be to go back in time and not make the mistake of buying it.
  • nelsonic 4y ago
    Exactly! A Time Machine is the answer! Captain Hindsight to the rescue! Why didn’t Elon think of that?
• mikkergp 4y ago
  I think Elon will succeed _and_ I agree with almost everything in this verge article. But Elon has been very inconsistent in what he’s said. It’s impossible for Elon to accomplish his current vision because it’s not internally consistent. You can’t only moderate what is within the law and make Twitter a more friendly place and make it more attractive to advertisers and grow it to a billion users, and make it the defacto public square and make it the free speech public network and eliminate bots, and make X the everything app and fire 75% of twitter employees. So while I think Elon Musk will succeed, it’s also interesting to point out the paradoxes and difficulty and in doing so elicit curiosity in how he will accomplish his goal. Conservatives seem to be taking a victory lap today, but it’s one of those things where compromise means no one ends up completely happy.
  • muaytimbo 4y ago
    I think there could be a balance here, allow that which is legal but distasteful but don't promote it or advertise beside it. You could probably repurpose some already pre-existing ML models searching for users to ban over takes that are too hot for twitter to mark as un-monatizable. Cleaning house is the way to make this vision of twitter a reality. Bots I think is both the harder and existential problem.
    • mikkergp 4y ago
      I agree this is definitely possible, but if you do all that, is it still the public square open to debate, if you are selectably promoting / monetizing "tasteful" tweets?
      • muaytimbo 4y ago
        I think distasteful nonsense gets deprioritized in all public squares as a natural consequence of our social mores.
        • awb 4y ago
          Not really. Look at pretty much any reality TV show, or the magazines at any checkout line. Nonsense and drama is big business from an attention and advertising standpoint. Plus, you can look at most biased news sources and see the drama that they selectively cover under the guise of news. "1 person did a bad thing" and "here's another reason why this entire group is conspiring against you" are not uncommon tropes.
• awb 4y ago
  > Never bet against Elon Success does breed success, but it’s not inevitable. There’s still hard work to be done and his big successes have come from hardware (batteries & rockets). Twitter is software in the social / content realm. To use your cooking analogy, it’s like saying don’t bet against Gordon Ramsey (an expert in the cooking / media / art / experience realm) if he acquired Virgin Records. I’m sure he has connections and some knowledge that helps, but it’s a new field with new challenges.
  • nelsonic 4y ago
    Long before there was Tesla and SpaceX there was Zip2 and Paypal; both software. Elon is first and foremost a software engineer. Yes, Twitter is social / content. But who better than someone who understands the platform well enough to have 100 Million followers to help take it to the next level?
• Invictus0 4y ago
  Fanboying Elon on the twitter deal of all things is just hilarious. He paid $44B with no diligence for a company with hardly a billion worth of revenue, stagnating growth, a last-generation social graph, an incredibly toxic userbase, and a very demoralized staff--and he has no plan for how to fix it either. This will go down as one of the worst deals in history and here you are saying "but Starlink".
  • reducesuffering 4y ago
    > hardly a billion worth of revenue Where do you pull these numbers out of? Twitter's yearly revenue was $5.2 billion. If you're so off base for the objective metric, want to guess how off you are on the rest of your opinion?
  • 1123581321 4y ago
    What are the generations of social graphs?
    • crazygringo 4y ago
      If that's a serious question, it's something like: 1) Friendster 2) MySpace 3) Facebook 4) Twitter 5) Instagram 6) TikTok Obviously the exact list is a matter of opinion, but Twitter is definitely not current-generation, I think everyone can agree on that. Here, have fun exploring when each one was "born" and therefore its generation: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=twitter,tiktok,instagram https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=t...
      • 1123581321 4y ago
        It was a serious question. I thought you were talking about the organizing computer science or social principle of the network but it seems you just meant the age the company was founded or became popular, which is unremarkable. Sorry to bother you.
        • crazygringo 4y ago
• b0sk 4y ago
  The article nails the inherent contradiction in optimizing for "free speech" and optimizing for advertising. He has burned 44 billion. He will bleed advertisers and legit users if it becomes a 4chan's pol board.
• memish 4y ago
  This is why so much hate is directed at Elon. His repeated success in different domains causes severe cognitive dissonance. It's an in your face painful reminder that success isn't entirely due to luck. It's a lot easier to dismiss someone's success when it only happens once.
  • ilyt 4y ago
    More like bewilderment on how many times someone can not deliver on promise yet still get people throwing money at them
    • memish 4y ago
      Millions of electric cars, thousands of charging stations, thousands of powerwalls, thousands of Starlink satellites and re-usable rockets weren't delivered? No one delivers 100%, but that's a historically exceptional track record.
    • bryanlarsen 4y ago
      Elon predicted in 2013 that Tesla would be shipping 500,000 cars a year by 2020. That was a crazy insane prediction that he delivered on, among many other similar predictions. Nobody expects all predictions to come true -- professional futurists have a batting rate of about 10%.
      • ilyt 4y ago
        I'm talking about stuff people preordered and still didn't got, not on his predictions.
        • cercatrova 4y ago
          Maybe people should stop preordering then. It's a dumb practice anyway, in any field, not just Teslas.
  • _hypx 4y ago
    Musk failed at countless things. It's pure delusion to think that he has "repeated success in different domains."
• michaelt 4y ago
  Haters are always telling me not to jump into a barbed-wire-covered nettle bush in a tar pit - why don't any of them have the vision to help me succeed at it? :)
• uni_rule 4y ago
  I doubt it because it's a braindead decision. It's also totally out of his wheelhouse. Twitter is not a commercial product, nor is it an engineering project. It's a forum. A really volatile forum. Elon has no experience moderating forums, he's not a site administrator. If he's the one actually calling the shots he's gonna run it into the ground because it simply isn't his field. This is the acquisition the least similar to any of his other successes he's ever made. Such a business simply doesn't run in the same logic as a contractor or manufacturer. Besides, a huge number of Twitter's core staff just jumped ship the moment they heard the news. That's the relevant experience. That's their product people. They fled. If the brain drain hits the company hard enough and the loosening of moderation goes particularly poorly the whole site is absolutely doomed and he will lose more money than Yahoo acquiring Tumblr did.
  • bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Remember that Elon co-founded x.com, which merged with confinity to form PayPal. WeChat is essentially what Elon wanted x.com to become, so it's not totally out of his wheelhouse. Turning Twitter into WeChat is probably a bigger challenge than sending a rocket to Mars, but...
    • Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
      > WeChat is essentially what Elon wanted x.com to become Yeah that doesn't count. Stuff you don't do doesn't count. Similarly with Tesla, legacy automakers will electrify the world. Being a cheerleader on the side doesn't count. CEOs are people who sign off quality of life for the people who buy the products/services that the company they lead is selling. And that is all there is to it. There is nothing tough or poetic about it. Sane people are scratching their heads at how some people are falling for the cult of the founder which started with Jobs.
• tenpies 4y ago
  > Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could. Is there anything other than aspirational thinking behind this statement? Musk himself has said it's a cash incinerator - and that's by Musk standards (read: used to huge public subsidies and constant capital raises).
• drcongo 4y ago
  I came here for the Musk apologist fun and I wasn't disappointed.