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Almost like Musk has no clue what he's doing, just winging it — and doing a poor job of it.
by michaericalribo 4y ago
Almost like Musk has no clue what he's doing, just winging it — and doing a poor job of it.
- lost_tourist 4y agoIt's like he has no business acumen at all. And I know that's not true. I think he's intentionally destroying the company for some unknown reason.
- shgsjaixurjdndh 4y ago
- suggala 4y agoProbably he would sell the identity of tweets and promised those countries to remove tweets which are critical of them.
- panick21_ 4y agoBased on his comments about Ukraine? Because the reality is that he helped basically destroy the Russian space industry and 100s of millions that would have gone to Russia is now going to SpaceX. Not to mention that making human flights possible allowed the US to remove a major political problem of being depended on the Russians to operate ISS. Calling them 'buddy buddy' because he doesn't believe the maximalist Ukraine position is the right one is a bit ridiculous? And what are you referring to with the Saudis? The Saudis are the main funders behind Lucid, a car company that is basically directly targeting and attempting to challenging Tesla.
- klyrs 4y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/03/saudi-twitter-investment-us-national-security-risk https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/03/saudi-twi...
- dragontamer 4y agoBased on Musk's Gigafactory Shanghai (China) and Musk's aluminum deal with Russia. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/14/tesla-has-bought-aluminum-from-russian-supplier-rusal-since-2020.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/14/tesla-has-bought-aluminum-fr... And the whole turning Starlink off over Crimea thing too, directly contradiction Ukrainian requests.
- panick21_ 4y agoAgain, non of this is even close to 'buddy buddy'. Buying raw materials from Russia isn't surprising. And SpaceX is not a arm of the Ukrainian military. The fact that Starlink helps Ukraine as much as it does disproves that they clearly are not 'buddy buddy'. At best you could say Musk is not an absolutist enemy of Russia who 100% supports Ukraine in each of their actions.
- dragontamer 4y ago> The fact that Starlink helps Ukraine Its not helping them in Crimea. Communications have been cut off there. If the Ukrainians can't trust their communication systems, then its worthless. Starlink was a big mistake, the USA should have never gifted it to the Ukrainians.
- panick21_ 4y ago> Its not helping them in Crimea. Communications have been cut off there. There are no Ukrainian military forces in Crimea. 99.9% of Starlink terminals in Crimea would operated by the Russians. > If the Ukrainians can't trust their communication systems, then its worthless. And yet they do relay on it everyday and it works well. So clearly it isn't worthless.
- dragontamer 4y ago> There are no Ukrainian military forces in Crimea The attacks on multiple Russian bases in Crimea, including the most recent Sevastopol attack and the Crimean Bridge attack, suggests otherwise. Ukrainian commandos are doing something in Crimea, and they probably want communications. They can't rely on Starlink for that however.
- rospaya 4y ago> Calling them 'buddy buddy' because he doesn't believe the maximalist Ukraine position is the right one is a bit ridiculous? What's that position? Defending themselves from agression by a much larger nuclear power?
- throwaway-lurk 4y ago> And I know that’s not true. It can be _true enough_. Twitter implemented verification to resolve the issue of impersonation, and give users confidence that they were interacting with the public entity they thought they were (likely among other reasons). In that sense, “verified” meant “they are who they claim to be”, which is great for building trust in the platform. (The additional moderation tools provided for verified accounts made them attractive even to relatively minor public entities.) Musk either deliberately reinterpreted or misunderstood “verified” to mean “they are a legitimate non-bot account”. That _could_ be another useful thing to know about an account, but it’s misaligned from its original purpose. _That’s an easy mistake to make if you don’t understand well the problems around account impersonation_, like if your experience is all in domains other than running a content platform. From there he envisions promoting messages from “real” accounts, and implicitly sinking messages from bots, scammers, spammers, and trolls — a fair enough conclusion. But when he then anticipates that will be valuable enough to most folks to pay $100/year, he overestimates what most people feel is disposable income, what most people would pay to have a “well-moderated” public forum, how people would feel about being asked to pay for a previously free service, how people feel about supporting him personally (especially at this point in his arc), and how people feel about being treated as “less than” by default. Between his admitted emotional awareness impairment and the fact that his “market research” was likely limited to asking his echo chamber, it’s not hard to imagine _why_ he’s learning lessons the hard way now.
- panick21_ 4y agoThere is no such thing as 'business acumen' running SpaceX and running Twitter are not at all the same thing. It requires totally different skill sets.
- c7b 4y agoI remember some statements around pricing for Tesla models by him that made me wonder (I think it was something like 'a Tesla model should cost the same amount everywhere on earth', which struck me as both admirable and naive), but having built up multiple billion-dolllar companies it's hard to deny that he must have made a lot of good decisions. I think there may very well be such a thing as business acumen, I know several people who were succesful building multiple businesses in different industries (nowhere near a scale that you'd have heard of them, but still). Some skills like negotiation, sales/marketing/PR, motivating employees, being good with numbers,... are universally useful for all kinds of business.
- panick21_ 4y agoBusiness acumen seems to be a pretty broad term. There is a subset of skills useful in many situations and for many business but maybe for some business some specific skills that are outside of 'business acumen' were the trigger for success. Maybe Musk has bad 'business acumen' but is good at coordinating engineering teams and that lead to the success of SpaceX and Tesla but doesn't work for Twitter because its not really an engineering problem.
- NathanKP 4y agoRemember that a lot of the "business acumen" for both SpaceX and Tesla has been politics and behind the scenes deals to get billions of dollars of government subsidies to prop up what would otherwise be a business that is hemorrhaging cash. Not sure if Twitter will be able to get government subsidies to prop it up.
- panick21_ 4y agoThis 'its all subsidies' is just nonsense that isn't true. Its history written by people who people who hate Musk. The claim that SpaceX and Tesla are only relevant because of govenrment subsidies is just bad business history, its simply not accurate. Or at least its not accurate unless you take the position that all cooperation only exist because of government. SpaceX got saved in 2008 by getting the COTS contract from NASA, that is clear true however, it wasn't billions and that money was not paid to them directly. They had to achieve checkpoints to get the money. Getting that contract only allowed them to raise the money. The government certainty has been a big costumer of SpaceX but they got these contracts because they beat the competition and offered far lower prices, not because Musk is good with behind the scenes politics. They competed successful both in the domestic and the international market. And for Tesla its just false. Tesla got the same tax exemptions any large company gets when investing in a region that just how it works in the US and that's not cash in Tesla account, but rather lower operating cost for the next 20 years. To even attempt to make the claim, you have to basically look at the fuel credit system. But that system isn't a direct subsidy for Tesla, its just the rules for the car industry as a whole. Any company can profit from that system if they want to, some did others didn't. For a few years there was a EV tax credit but only for a very limited number of vehicles that Tesla quickly blew past, but again that was for all car companies and it was a tax credit for people who buy cars, so it wouldn't help Tesla as they were hemorrhaging cash. Tesla got a loans from the DoE for Model S production. This loan was specifically to set up Model S production, and by that point Tesla had a few options to finance production it was not a bail out because they were running out of cash. Tesla paid this loan back and the govenrment made profit. Under the same program Ford and GM also got much bigger loans and have still not paid them back, they had to ask the govenrment multiple time to extend the loan period). And the claim that Musk business constantly hemorrhage cash is also mostly false. If you sit down and compare SpaceX to all the other rocket companies before and since, you will discover that SpaceX is was incredibly low cash operation. To give you some comparison, Virgin Orbit spent something like 400M to get to Orbit with a small rocket. SpaceX had something like 100M. RocketLab spent about the same amount as SpaceX but for a smaller rocket with less potential for upgrades. Other companies like Relativity have received billions in funding before they ever launch a rocket. Firefly went bankrupt and then got 300M of millions of investment to launch their first rocket. What SpaceX did and with how little cash they did it, in a political situation way less friendly then what it was a decade later is astonishing. We can make the same argument for Tesla. Compare Tesla to the EV Boom that happened in the last 4-5 years, all these other companies like Nikola, Lordstown, Rivian, Lucid and so on were swimming in cash often getting 100s of millions and sometimes 10s of billions in cash. In hindsight and what we are seeing now is that Tesla was incredibly cash and capital efficient.
- vagrantJin 4y agoWhat boundless optimism. It's Elon Musk. Ofcourse he can't be lacking in any respect. He's a genius.
- ALittleLight 4y agoAn alternate conspiracy is that what Musk is doing is working. He signals to the company that the era of "move fast and break things" has arrived, he creates a ton of drama and attention which may drive, he tests a personal theory about what would work, and he starts to build understanding about the limits of the business. I have no idea what's really going on - but I'm interested in the results. I think 3-5 years will reveal whether this was a catastrophic mistake, a brilliant plan, or something in between. "Launch a new feature, observe the problems, throttle the new feature while you resolve the problems" doesn't seem obviously insane to me.
- hraedon 4y agoTwitter needs to generate roughly a billion dollars a year in additional cashflow just to service the debt Musk saddled it with. They already weren’t profitable, but let’s say that they were breakeven and that ad revenue would be sufficient to cover non-debt costs. There’s absolutely no way that 100,000,000+ people are going to sign up for twitter blue; they would be exceptionally fortunate to get a tenth of that figure. His other ideas are chickenfeed, so how does he get to an extra billion in revenue? How does he do that when he seems to be actively antagonizing twitter’s only meaningful source of revenue?
- ALittleLight 4y agoI'm not saying that it will work or that this is a good plan or anything. I really have no idea. I'm saying that it might be part of a plan and one way to know is to wait and see if it works out. If someone is playing a video game you've never played, and you see them mashing the controls in a random way, it's possible they have no idea what they're doing. If you wait a bit and watch you can see if they lose, which would validate the theory they didn't know what they were doing, or if they win - which would suggest they did know what they were doing.
- hraedon 4y agoI think we have already waited long enough with Twitter to conclude that the emperor, in this case, has no clothes. Twitter isn't like SpaceX or Tesla: there aren't enormous government contracts, subsidies, or climate credits to prop up its finances. There is no plausible replacement for the advertising revenue his style of leadership is actively alienating, and there is a real risk that his strategy is exposing Twitter to enormous FTC sanctions given that they are already under a consent decree. It is much more likely that he's deeply in over his head and floundering than it is that he has a master plan he can only execute by taking a blowtorch to Twitter's current business structure. How much worse does it have to get before that theory is validated?
- root_axis 4y agoThat makes no sense. This isn't some 4d chess move that requires grandiose speculation to understand. Elon made a huge mistake and is now floundering in a panic. I'm sure he thought David Sacks would come in with a bunch of brilliant ideas to fix the company, but as is almost always the case things are a lot more complicated in reality than sideline shit-talkers like Elon and Sacks make it out to be.