7 ms·

I seriously doubt Twitter will have a growth stage again

anthropodie 4y ago
Hell I don't like what Elon does most of the times but you have to admit he did built successful companies from ground up in fields no one was even looking into. Twitter might succeed or it might fail but Twitter in its current form both as a company and social media paltform was bad.
- smcl 4y ago
  You have to admit that he invested in some companies in fields that no-one was looking into. He's made a few big bets that have paid off extremely well. That's not nothing, and is impressive but it's not building a company. By all accounts he's a bit of a micro-manager, but I suspect there's only so much he could micro-manage or actually contribute directly in ventures like SpaceX or Tesla (he did make a door-handle patent tho). Twitter on the other hand is another matter - no huge technical barriers stopping him from getting his hands dirty, no lives are at stake or regulatory bodies that are going to tell him "no that is dangerous" - so we're finally seeing what Elon unleashed looks like. So far it can probably be described as "chaotic" at best, it remains to be seen whether this chaos will disperse and Twitter will emerge leaner and better. My belief is that he doesn't understand Twitter and its users quite as well as he thinks, and that Twitter will slowly get a bit more annoying and less profitable until he loses interest or gets distracted by something else. We will see, I use Twitter a lot so I hope that I'm wrong.
  - randomsearch 4y ago
    Are you saying musk’s role in SpaceX and Tesla is as an investor? That seems so disingenuous that it’s impossible not to conclude this post is purely emotional. If you hate Musk, fine, but please just stick to the facts and articulate why you hate him. I don’t understand why there is so much emotion around Musk. He has done good things and bad things. He has done incredible, near possible things. He works ridiculously hard. He’s rich. He has said and posted things he shouldn’t. I don’t feel that I am in a position to say he is a terrible person. I don’t even know the guy. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without SpaceX and Tesla. I am genuinely fascinated by this hatred. I’ve tried to compile a list of why people might hate him: - posted a conspiracy theory on Twitter (which he did then delete) - childishly insulted a diver - is a shameless self promoter - fires staff brutally - makes huge and sometimes unreasonable demands on his workforce - disagreed with covid policy, partly on the argument that the fatality rate is low and there’s not much you can really do about it Ok, these are bad. But he’s hated as if he is the new Hitler. I don’t get it. I’d really appreciate it if someone could rationally explain why Elon is deserving of such great hatred.
    - smcl 4y ago
      Eh, guess I just don't know enough about SpaceX then. If you read my comment and interpreted it as "hatred" then that is odd. I don't think it's possible to hate someone you don't know. I mean, every time he has popped up in the last 5 years or so he's been saying or doing something dumb or annoying so quite a lot of people have gradually gotten tired of that. But it’s not hatred at all. He's not treated like the next Hitler by any stretch of the imagination. He's more like a village drunk who just keeps showing up doing stupid things like peeing on your doorstep or passing out in your garden. You don't hate that person, you're just like "[sigh] ok I guess we have to deal with him again..."
      - llamaLord 4y ago
        He’s also built rockets that land themselves, scaled electric car manufacturing, launched a world-wide low-latency satellite internet service, and made more progress on self-driving vehicles than literally any other company in that same time. If your town drunk is doing that much good for the world, I think you’d forgive them for pissing on your doorstep once or twice a year.
        smcl 4y ago
        Well this is the other side of the public opinion on Elon Musk. His companies have done a bunch of things, ranging from impressive to bad. As outsiders all we know is that his involvement with, say, a rocket that can land itself is somewhere between "Elon single-handedly designed, constructed and assembled every part of it" and "Elon told someone the rockets re-usable". There's no way to know, but you and a legion of people seem to be portraying his involvement as closer to the former (literally "He’s also built rockets that land themselves..." - come on) Honestly this discourse has played out a thousand times over. Some people love him, attribute all his companies' wins to him and memory-hole any of the fuck-ups or gaffes. Some people acknowledge his business acumen, don't quite believe the hype on the company-level achievements that get attributed to him personally and find his personality as portrayed on traditional and social media to be grating. I'm clearly in the latter group and I think that's a pretty uncontroversial position to take. Edit: would the drive-by downvoters care to explain?
  - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
    You have to admit that Tesla didn't sell a single EV, nor did SpaceX launch a production vehicle or secure high value contracts until Musk took over.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      It’s almost like both companies need metric tons of money to do anything remarkable - isn’t that the point of YCombinator as well? That’s just venture capitalism. He just has the ego of a manchild and bought the title of “founder” as wellz
    - random314 4y ago
      Musk took over Tesla by firing the founder CEO, and took another 4 years to ship a car to production. The car had already been built when Musk took over. He only needed to build a production pipeline.
      - andrewinardeer 4y ago
        Building a production pipeline and scaling it is no small feat in itself though. Hats off to anyone who can do that and make it profitable.
        random314 4y ago
        Sure, there are several other companies that are able to do that as well.
        PM_me_your_math 4y ago
        They must all be run by man-children, too, according to the people who have never done it before.
        random314 4y ago
        You can put as many words into people's mouth as you wish. This can help to make a non-argument appear to be an argument.
  - chaosbolt 4y ago
    >You have to admit that he invested in some companies Yeah sure, he just invested in Paypal, then invested in Tesla, then invested in SpaceX. I'm not even sure if I'm answering real people or bots anymore, everyone sounds the same now: "Elon good, because environment and space and he made reusable rockets and tesla cars are so good etc.", (Elon starts saying wrongtalk about the media and other sensitive subjects), "Elon bad, because he called some diver years ago a pedophile, and he just invested in tesla and spacex no biggie easy for anyone". But hey who cares right? I've been getting insulted by everyone here for saying Youtube censors videos and google censors results etc. yet just a couple days ago some leaked documents showed the DHS with the help of tech giants are planning to push the censorship even harder.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - smcl 4y ago
      Flagged this. There is a reasonable discussion to be had here, and it was being had. But you're calling me a bot, you're misrepresenting what I've said and launching into an unrelated rant about censorship. This is flamebait, plain and simple.
    - hnusersarelame 4y ago
    - duhast 4y ago
      His company X.com was acquired by PayPal.
      - smcl 4y ago
        Sort of - X.com merged with Confinity (who supposedly had some good payments processing system) and became PayPal.
- _djo_ 4y ago
  Twitter was a mixed bag, but it was genuinely useful for news, niche interests, and helping under served issues and communities get more prominence. It's where the kind of open source intelligence that helped to expose Russia trying to cover up its role in the MH17 shoot down emerged, coalesced, and achieved prominence, as one example. I worry much of that will be lost without having a natural new home with the same reach and impact. Musk might be good at building and running engineering companies, but Twitter is not that. The social aspect is far more important than the underlying technology, and Musk and his advisors are terrible at that. I don't see any way out of this that leaves Twitter better.
  - anthropodie 4y ago
    > Musk might be good at building and running engineering companies, but Twitter is not that. The social aspect is far more important than the underlying technology, and Musk and his advisors are terrible at that. Agree
- JaimeThompson 4y ago
  >successful companies from ground up in fields no one was even looking into. NASA, ESA, and all the other space agencies might disagree with you here.
  - anthropodie 4y ago
    I was talking about private space company. I mean who thinks like I'm going to start a private space company that will launch freaking rockets in space. I don't think any private company did that before SpaceX
    - JaimeThompson 4y ago
      Please see https://www.celestis.com/about/conestoga-1/ https://www.celestis.com/about/conestoga-1/
    - kaba0 4y ago
      A huge amount of government subsidies does help tremendously at that…
    - _djo_ 4y ago
      Like United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, Northrop Grumman, Virgin Orbit, etc? Also, SpaceX would not exist were it not for a US government decision to fund and develop private spaceflight launch capabilities for NASA and the US Air Force. In fact the idea was given to Musk by Mike Griffin who at the time headed up In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm and could also source the right technical experts to form the core engineering group. Shortly after he became NASA's administrator and gave SpaceX a huge development and launch contract before it had flown anything. The idea that SpaceX emerged from nothing and bootstrapped its way to success has always been false. That doesn't mean they don't deserve praise for doing a ton of things right and having an impressively bold engineering strategy, of course.
- shmatt 4y ago
  Well, lets skip the fact he didn't build those companies. Both companies rely heavily on government subsidies. He's in part 3 of his dependence on big government, demanding they start subsidizing Starlink Remove those subsidies tomorrow and the companies fold, all of them Can Elon figure out a way to get the government to subsidize Twitter? Maybe, but it's going to be harder
esoterica 4y ago
Don't tell Elon then, because he definitely paid a growth multiple for Twitter. If Twitter never grows beyond its current size then his investment is a giant failure no matter how much he manages to cut costs.
- the_duke 4y ago
  Well, he tried very hard to get out of it but failed.

Hell I don't like what Elon does most of the times but you have to admit he did built successful companies from ground up in fields no one was even looking into. Twitter might succeed or it might fail but Twitter in its current form both as a company and social media paltform was bad.

smcl 4y ago
You have to admit that he invested in some companies in fields that no-one was looking into. He's made a few big bets that have paid off extremely well. That's not nothing, and is impressive but it's not building a company. By all accounts he's a bit of a micro-manager, but I suspect there's only so much he could micro-manage or actually contribute directly in ventures like SpaceX or Tesla (he did make a door-handle patent tho). Twitter on the other hand is another matter - no huge technical barriers stopping him from getting his hands dirty, no lives are at stake or regulatory bodies that are going to tell him "no that is dangerous" - so we're finally seeing what Elon unleashed looks like. So far it can probably be described as "chaotic" at best, it remains to be seen whether this chaos will disperse and Twitter will emerge leaner and better. My belief is that he doesn't understand Twitter and its users quite as well as he thinks, and that Twitter will slowly get a bit more annoying and less profitable until he loses interest or gets distracted by something else. We will see, I use Twitter a lot so I hope that I'm wrong.
- randomsearch 4y ago
  Are you saying musk’s role in SpaceX and Tesla is as an investor? That seems so disingenuous that it’s impossible not to conclude this post is purely emotional. If you hate Musk, fine, but please just stick to the facts and articulate why you hate him. I don’t understand why there is so much emotion around Musk. He has done good things and bad things. He has done incredible, near possible things. He works ridiculously hard. He’s rich. He has said and posted things he shouldn’t. I don’t feel that I am in a position to say he is a terrible person. I don’t even know the guy. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without SpaceX and Tesla. I am genuinely fascinated by this hatred. I’ve tried to compile a list of why people might hate him: - posted a conspiracy theory on Twitter (which he did then delete) - childishly insulted a diver - is a shameless self promoter - fires staff brutally - makes huge and sometimes unreasonable demands on his workforce - disagreed with covid policy, partly on the argument that the fatality rate is low and there’s not much you can really do about it Ok, these are bad. But he’s hated as if he is the new Hitler. I don’t get it. I’d really appreciate it if someone could rationally explain why Elon is deserving of such great hatred.
  - smcl 4y ago
    Eh, guess I just don't know enough about SpaceX then. If you read my comment and interpreted it as "hatred" then that is odd. I don't think it's possible to hate someone you don't know. I mean, every time he has popped up in the last 5 years or so he's been saying or doing something dumb or annoying so quite a lot of people have gradually gotten tired of that. But it’s not hatred at all. He's not treated like the next Hitler by any stretch of the imagination. He's more like a village drunk who just keeps showing up doing stupid things like peeing on your doorstep or passing out in your garden. You don't hate that person, you're just like "[sigh] ok I guess we have to deal with him again..."
    - llamaLord 4y ago
      He’s also built rockets that land themselves, scaled electric car manufacturing, launched a world-wide low-latency satellite internet service, and made more progress on self-driving vehicles than literally any other company in that same time. If your town drunk is doing that much good for the world, I think you’d forgive them for pissing on your doorstep once or twice a year.
      - smcl 4y ago
        Well this is the other side of the public opinion on Elon Musk. His companies have done a bunch of things, ranging from impressive to bad. As outsiders all we know is that his involvement with, say, a rocket that can land itself is somewhere between "Elon single-handedly designed, constructed and assembled every part of it" and "Elon told someone the rockets re-usable". There's no way to know, but you and a legion of people seem to be portraying his involvement as closer to the former (literally "He’s also built rockets that land themselves..." - come on) Honestly this discourse has played out a thousand times over. Some people love him, attribute all his companies' wins to him and memory-hole any of the fuck-ups or gaffes. Some people acknowledge his business acumen, don't quite believe the hype on the company-level achievements that get attributed to him personally and find his personality as portrayed on traditional and social media to be grating. I'm clearly in the latter group and I think that's a pretty uncontroversial position to take. Edit: would the drive-by downvoters care to explain?
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  You have to admit that Tesla didn't sell a single EV, nor did SpaceX launch a production vehicle or secure high value contracts until Musk took over.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    It’s almost like both companies need metric tons of money to do anything remarkable - isn’t that the point of YCombinator as well? That’s just venture capitalism. He just has the ego of a manchild and bought the title of “founder” as wellz
  - random314 4y ago
    Musk took over Tesla by firing the founder CEO, and took another 4 years to ship a car to production. The car had already been built when Musk took over. He only needed to build a production pipeline.
    - andrewinardeer 4y ago
      Building a production pipeline and scaling it is no small feat in itself though. Hats off to anyone who can do that and make it profitable.
      - random314 4y ago
        Sure, there are several other companies that are able to do that as well.
        PM_me_your_math 4y ago
        They must all be run by man-children, too, according to the people who have never done it before.
        random314 4y ago
        You can put as many words into people's mouth as you wish. This can help to make a non-argument appear to be an argument.
- chaosbolt 4y ago
  >You have to admit that he invested in some companies Yeah sure, he just invested in Paypal, then invested in Tesla, then invested in SpaceX. I'm not even sure if I'm answering real people or bots anymore, everyone sounds the same now: "Elon good, because environment and space and he made reusable rockets and tesla cars are so good etc.", (Elon starts saying wrongtalk about the media and other sensitive subjects), "Elon bad, because he called some diver years ago a pedophile, and he just invested in tesla and spacex no biggie easy for anyone". But hey who cares right? I've been getting insulted by everyone here for saying Youtube censors videos and google censors results etc. yet just a couple days ago some leaked documents showed the DHS with the help of tech giants are planning to push the censorship even harder.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - smcl 4y ago
    Flagged this. There is a reasonable discussion to be had here, and it was being had. But you're calling me a bot, you're misrepresenting what I've said and launching into an unrelated rant about censorship. This is flamebait, plain and simple.
  - hnusersarelame 4y ago
  - duhast 4y ago
    His company X.com was acquired by PayPal.
    - smcl 4y ago
      Sort of - X.com merged with Confinity (who supposedly had some good payments processing system) and became PayPal.
_djo_ 4y ago
Twitter was a mixed bag, but it was genuinely useful for news, niche interests, and helping under served issues and communities get more prominence. It's where the kind of open source intelligence that helped to expose Russia trying to cover up its role in the MH17 shoot down emerged, coalesced, and achieved prominence, as one example. I worry much of that will be lost without having a natural new home with the same reach and impact. Musk might be good at building and running engineering companies, but Twitter is not that. The social aspect is far more important than the underlying technology, and Musk and his advisors are terrible at that. I don't see any way out of this that leaves Twitter better.
- anthropodie 4y ago
  > Musk might be good at building and running engineering companies, but Twitter is not that. The social aspect is far more important than the underlying technology, and Musk and his advisors are terrible at that. Agree
JaimeThompson 4y ago
>successful companies from ground up in fields no one was even looking into. NASA, ESA, and all the other space agencies might disagree with you here.
- anthropodie 4y ago
  I was talking about private space company. I mean who thinks like I'm going to start a private space company that will launch freaking rockets in space. I don't think any private company did that before SpaceX
  - JaimeThompson 4y ago
    Please see https://www.celestis.com/about/conestoga-1/ https://www.celestis.com/about/conestoga-1/
  - kaba0 4y ago
    A huge amount of government subsidies does help tremendously at that…
  - _djo_ 4y ago
    Like United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, Northrop Grumman, Virgin Orbit, etc? Also, SpaceX would not exist were it not for a US government decision to fund and develop private spaceflight launch capabilities for NASA and the US Air Force. In fact the idea was given to Musk by Mike Griffin who at the time headed up In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm and could also source the right technical experts to form the core engineering group. Shortly after he became NASA's administrator and gave SpaceX a huge development and launch contract before it had flown anything. The idea that SpaceX emerged from nothing and bootstrapped its way to success has always been false. That doesn't mean they don't deserve praise for doing a ton of things right and having an impressively bold engineering strategy, of course.
shmatt 4y ago
Well, lets skip the fact he didn't build those companies. Both companies rely heavily on government subsidies. He's in part 3 of his dependence on big government, demanding they start subsidizing Starlink Remove those subsidies tomorrow and the companies fold, all of them Can Elon figure out a way to get the government to subsidize Twitter? Maybe, but it's going to be harder

esoterica 4y ago

Don't tell Elon then, because he definitely paid a growth multiple for Twitter. If Twitter never grows beyond its current size then his investment is a giant failure no matter how much he manages to cut costs.

the_duke 4y ago
Well, he tried very hard to get out of it but failed.