Thanks for the insightful response! Here's some rambling thoughts about what your response made me think about. I do think it's fair enough to read it as a pro

Thanks for the insightful response! Here's some rambling thoughts about what your response made me think about. I do think it's fair enough to read it as a pro-Elon take, to some degree. I find him to be a fascinating person, because I think there are many useful things to learn about building successful and important companies like Tesla or SpaceX, and I think most of his intentions are genuine (and good and correct). I think there's a lot of cynicism and misinformation and such around his companies that is mostly noise. I don't think it's true that he is dumb or incompetent, or obsessed with money, etc. If you watch a video of him talking about rocket engine design, you can definitely tell that he knows this stuff in great enough detail to be making low-level design decisions – he's always deeply involved, so much so that it's a difficult environment for many people to work in I think. Now I also have lots of things where I disagree with him – I think he has lots of blind spots and is clearly in a right-wing info bubble (probably because of Twitter!), and I'm not sure I would try to emulate many parts of his workaholic management style, etc. But also, I don't care as much about offering a moral judgement on him as a person, I can't change him. What's interesting to me is what can be learned. What things he does that are remarkably effective, and why. And conversely, what he does that really pisses people off in such a way that they are likely to ignore those things because they were upset by unrelated things he's said. It's okay to write him off, I understand why people do that, but I want to learn from it! I would say that I have no idea whether he will be successful with Twitter, but I think he has a decent enough track record with his other companies. But that may not be enough, they are very different companies. And he really has put himself in a pickle, since he's not really acquired a company in the same way, let alone one that has such mindshare. He's certainly dragging his reputation and Twitter's reputation through the mud. But my take is also that Twitter has always been a product that is particularly well-designed to make useful discourse difficult or impossible, and to amplify drama and misinformation. And despite being a platform most people seem to dislike and doesn't have tons of users, it's currently locked in a negative-feedback loop with the news media, and disproportionately influential on the world. I think that's a really bad thing. I would be happy enough if Elon craters it, but I suppose it's also good if he fixes it somehow. It seems ultimately quite important that there is some way for society to have discussions at civilization-scale about what is important to us. Pre-Elon Twitter was not the right platform for that, so destroying it or replacing it is absolutely fine with me.