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I think he only posts polls when he believes he knows the outcome already. Yesterday he posted a poll about unsuspending the journalist accounts and when the ou

I think he only posts polls when he believes he knows the outcome already. Yesterday he posted a poll about unsuspending the journalist accounts and when the outcome wasn't what he wanted instead of following the majority vote he posted it again with different options (with the same result, which he did abide by the second time). I think this indicates he's tired of Twitter already. But he still owns it, so who will he put in his place? Or maybe he is expecting a landslide "no" result?

drexlspivey 4y ago
My money is on David Sacks if we would take the job (probably not)
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  Somewhat ironically, Chamath, Calacanis, and Sacks can spot a bad deal.
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    Why ironically? (Genuinely curious)
    - cactusplant7374 4y ago
      Chamath has his SPACs and Calacanis has his syndicate. They know how to craft deals that benefit them over other investors. I assume Sacks does the same with his investments. They know a bad deal because they are usually the ones crafting them.
pseudo0 4y ago
It seems like it would be the smart move to hire someone with expertise in social media, give them his high-level vision, and let them implement the details. The last few weeks of Elon's micromanagement have been a complete shitshow.
- wmf 4y ago
  Everyone with expertise in social media hates Elon's high-level vision.
  - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
    Depends what we mean by his high-level vision. If it's the "everything app", I'd say that vision is not bad by default, but the details matter. But if his high-level vision is described by his actions so far... oh my God, yeah, no one would wanna touch that with a thousand mile pole.
    - sqlcommando 4y ago
      "Everything app" seems like a great vision. Let's not get hung up on the details of, you know... everything.
      - ssnistfajen 4y ago
        It's fun to think about until you realize building the company/service portofolio that can support a mega-app would almost certainly attract ire from regulators even within the U.S., ignoring the amount of capital investment required to achieve it. Plus, Uber/Spotify/Doordash/Yelp can barely turn a profit as-is. What incentives will the everything app offer to pull consumers away from these existing competitors other than subsidizing the services with VC money, which would only worsen profitability and sustainability?
        BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
        Let's imagine Google Cloud, AWS, Azure are resp. Google's / Amazon's / Microsoft's everything apps. They are managing to handle the regulatory weight of supporting applications of all kinds of nature, and if you rethink Twitter as a platform you can do the same as well. Many things are possible, and the Twitter app today may even continue to work as-is. But underneath it will be able to power more apps and more use cases, all tied under a common cohesive set of interactive primitives, much higher level than what cloud applications today support. This means less to reinvent, less to rediscover, and easier more natural integration between apps, services and components. It'd be a lot of work, definitely not a 2-3 month project. So you'd need also a survival strategy that keeps Twitter 1.0 working and profitable.
ratio11 4y ago
Absolutely. This is one last attempt to frame his failure and giving up as being his dedication to “vox populi”.
- minimaxir 4y ago
  Right after a massively unpopular policy decision. He can't control the narrative anymore.
croon 4y ago
Also he can trivially determine the outcome of said poll if he wants too. It's incredibly insincere to even pretend to use them.
- calcifer 4y ago
  I don't think he'd dare. Everything he says internally gets leaked immediately, no way he'd order someone to mess with poll data.
  - croon 4y ago
    Maybe, or maybe not, but the fact of the matter is that a poll in a private platform does not a vote make, and using it as such for varying degrees of impactful events is either irresponsible or willfully deceptive.
  - Lerc 4y ago
    I believe the ship might have sailed on the "I don't think he'd dare" argument. I can't help but think he's in quite an unhealthy mental state at the moment.
minimaxir 4y ago
Last month he implied he was looking for a successor: https://www.axios.com/2022/11/16/elon-musk-twitter-ceo-new-leader https://www.axios.com/2022/11/16/elon-musk-twitter-ceo-new-l... Although I'm not sure who would want to run Twitter now.
- modeless 4y ago
  Interesting. Maybe he found the CEO he wants earlier than expected. That would make sense. If the poll says so he can step down immediately, and if not then he can still step down later whenever he feels like. Of course he still maintains ultimate control either way but he can go back to focusing on SpaceX and Tesla more, either immediately or maybe in a few months. So in this case he may not believe he knows the outcome ahead of time, but it doesn't matter because the outcome is the same either way. Only the timing is different.
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  I'm sure any of the goons who helped plan this debacle after he was forced to buy^H^H^H make good on his agreement to buy it would be delighted to run it.
  - mastax 4y ago
    He wasn't forced to buy Twitter. He bought Twitter and then was indirectly forced to follow through with the purchase contract that he already made.
- philippejara 4y ago
  I can guarantee you there are plenty of people who do, you really don't need an ex-social media CEO or whatever to do it. Would be absolutely hilarious if he somehow managed to get moot to be the CEO.
- layer8 4y ago
  > Although I'm not sure who would want to run Twitter now. Especially while continually being at Elon’s mercy.
tootie 4y ago
As someone who has muted his account, it's already baked in that only his followers are voting.
- xenospn 4y ago
  I muted his account months ago, but still got the retweets. I voted yes, which seems to be getting momentum and is now leading by a very comfortable margin.
  - mindcrime 4y ago
    Same. I have Musk muted, but I saw a mention of the poll in a tweet by geohotz, so I went and found it (and voted "yes"). And I'm sure some Musk critics decided not to mute him anyway. Hell, I only finally got annoyed enough to do it about a week ago.
  - netsharc 4y ago
    I'd prefer "no" wins and that he's stuck with his fuck up a few more weeks/months... if "yes" wins, he gets his cheap way out without losing face...
    - xenospn 4y ago
      The time to "not lose face" was months ago.
  - tootie 4y ago
    If you mute, the rewtweets will be masked unless you reveal them. I saw this one because it was on HN before it closed. I never saw the previous polls until they were closed.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    I have him blocked. Surprisingly, I can still click through and it looks like I could vote if I wanted to (which feels like a bug, but, eh, probably not Twitter's biggest issue right now).
robofanatic 4y ago
not too long ago he claimed that spam and bot accounts make up an estimated 11% of Twitter’s total user base, I don't think that has changed much so I agree these polls are simply a farce.
ckastner 4y ago
It does seem so, and hilariously, it appears to be backfiring. "As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it" https://notabird.site/elonmusk/status/1604623424164282368 https://notabird.site/elonmusk/status/1604623424164282368
- czbond 4y ago
  He doesn't want to lead Twitter... social media is a junk hole mostly filled with lowest common denominator users. He's definitely tired of the stupid issues on both sides that are filled with entitled users and whiners. It's a lose lose, let someone else fill their day with that.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    He bought Twitter. From day one he didn’t need to be CEO. But he chose to immediately show up and make big changes, both in personnel and in the platform itself. He doesn’t need a poll to hire somebody else to run the company.
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  He can take as long as he wants to find a replacement. There aren’t many that can do to Twitter’s revenue what he did to Twitter’s revenue.
hobbitstan 4y ago
He can likely manipulate the results on the backend anyway. This is a real cowardly way to make decisions, by pretending they come from someone else.
- j_crick 4y ago
  Some people have different modes of making decisions and framing the results, like all good outcomes being on them and all bad outcomes being due to external circumstances and “wasn’t me”. You think that’s cowardice (and assume morals), for other people it could be just convenience
- dylan604 4y ago
  Clearly, the vote count is full of fraud because all of the users are bots anyways, yeah? In the pools of thought that Elon floats in, it would only be more fraudulent if Dominion was conducting the poll.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    Elon even said himself while running the Trump resurrection poll that there were so many bots voting. It's somewhat bizarre.
pantalaimon 4y ago
> But he still owns it, so who will he put in his place? Lex Fridman just volunteered https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1604627087385661440 https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1604627087385661440
- JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
  Amazing this guy was ready to get on his knees for Putin up until January. Lots of stuff are known about Putin since 2000 till January 2022, some perhaps even worse than Ukraine invasion For sure he has a soft spot for Autocrats both in Moscow and in San Francisco
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    > Amazing this guy was ready to get on his knees for Putin up until January. What do you mean exactly? > For sure he has a soft spot for Autocrats both in Moscow and in San Francisco The West establishment has a soft spot for autocrats: whitewashing the wealth of oligarchs, buying cheap oil stolen from common people, selling anti-protest crowd control gear and tear gas, etc, etc; even though "lots of stuff are known about Putin since 2000 till January 2022, some perhaps even worse than Ukraine invasion". I don't think Lex has done or has expressed a wish to do anything comparable to that.
    - JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
      > > I don't think Lex has done or has expressed a wish to do anything comparable to that. Every video of his that YT pushes in my feed I see Putin in the thumbnail with sunglasses and behind a huge explosion Like it’s cool or something that an autocrat with a cult of personality controls 5000 nukes
      - LarryMullins 4y ago
        > Every video of his that YT pushes in my feed I see Putin in the thumbnail with sunglasses and behind a huge explosion I just scrolled through the past 8 years of thumbnails on his main channel and the past year of thumbnails on his clips channel. The thumbnail you describe doesn't exist. What I found is that he has several thumbnails of Putin looking stern, but without any sunglasses or nuclear blasts. (He also has thumbnails of Hitler and Stalin looking stern, but I don't take that to suggest he's simultaneously a communist and a nazi.) Additionally he has several videos with nuclear blast thumbnails, but none of them have anybody superimposed on front of the explosion. And he doesn't have any meme-like photoshopped sunglasses thumbnails. That sort of meme thumbnail doesn't seem to be his style. (I didn't watch any of these videos because I can't stand Lex, so I can't comment on what he actually says. But the sort of thumbnail you're describing just isn't his style.)
jakear 4y ago
Changing the prior poll made sense. The options were “unban immediately”, “unban in a day”, “unban in a week”, “unban in some longer a lot of time”. The issue with this is obvious: there’s only one “you fucked up” option and the “I agree but let’s talk specifics” group is divided into three. So even though the majority of people said “I agree”, the “you fucked up” got the most votes. Classic first-past-the-post failure mode. That said, the later poll didn’t reflect this dynamic. My suspicion is that early on in polls the answers are likely to lean pro-Elon, as the votes are more likely to to be Twitter stan’s. As time goes by word of mouth spreads news of the poll to people who aren’t as active on twitter and accordingly are less likely to be pro-elon. It was the same with the “should I step down” poll, started out pro-Elon, flipped as popularity increased. https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603600001057185792 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/16036000010571857...
drumhead 4y ago
He's stuck with Twitter now, at an overinflated price. He'll never be able to make enough money from it to justify the valuation. Will he leave, no he wont, he'll still pull the strings from behind the scences. He just wont be doing it so publically anymore, he'll get a front to do it for him.
spamizbad 4y ago
He’s just going to put someone like Blake Masters or David Sacks in charge. Which, honestly, would be worse than old Twitter but better than erratic Elon Twitter.
- fncivivue7 4y ago
  "eratic Elon twitter" - ignoring the news, what exactly is erattic about twitter right now? Doesn't it basically work exactly the same?
  - spamizbad 4y ago
    Rules dropping out of the blue around flight tracking, not being able to link to other social media sites, the confusing verification issue with all the fake/parody accounts, mass banning of journalists for linking to reporting he didn’t like etc. Old Twitter had none of this.
h11h 4y ago
The second poll about unbanning the journalists went for 24 hours (the first was only an hour or so), so even though "now" was the winning option, he still got the outcome he was looking for by giving them a 24+ hour suspension.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >he still got the outcome he was looking for what was that outcome? fewer people knowing about his childish behavior? no, that wasn't it. fewer people knowing about his private jet and the mechanisms of being able to track it. nope, didn't work that way either. showing the world he's a petulant little child that throws a hissy fit when he doesn't get his way. now we're getting somewhere.
czbond 4y ago
I thought Jason Calacanis was going to run it. He'd be much better.... also the type to not put up with crap - and not the type either to "run by committee".
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  He seems to be pretty happy with putting up with Musk's crap, as any sycophant would.
- Raed667 4y ago
  He definitely seems to like the flavor of Elon's shoe polish ... That should be qualification enough
hristov 4y ago
Of course he knows what the results will be. He owns twitter. He has all the admin passwords to the server that runs the poll. The admins that run the server answer to him. The result of this poll will be whatever Elon Musk wants it to be.
- knighthack 4y ago
  That's just silly. Passwords are stored encrypted. No way would they be able to even know what the passwords are, even if they know who the users are.
  - Rury 4y ago
    Not at all. You don't even need other people's passwords or accounts to fake a poll. Just admin rights to the server, or a bunch of bots.
- exodust 4y ago
  Implausible conspiracy. Email to the admins: "Hey guys I'd like the results of the poll to be the following..." No chance. Interesting side note: Here in Australia this morning on the ABC public broadcaster's national News channel, one of the presenters said "if you hate Elon Musk, vote yes"... encouraging the mostly left-leaning ABC viewers to log on and vote Musk out. The poll will get swamped by this politically divisive Musk-hating recruitment drive, which is why the results stand as they are.
  - hristov 4y ago
    Doesn't have to be an email. He can tell them in person. I am sure after all the layoffs he has found some engineers that are obedient/scared enough.
- ratg13 4y ago
  More like he wins either way ---- Yes = he gets to step away from the dumpster fire without it looking like it was his decision No = all of his previous decisions are justified
iconjack 4y ago
That is not what happened at all. In the first poll, he asked when the journalists should be unsuspended and the options were (a) now, (b) tomorrow, (c) in 7 days, and (d) longer. Choice (a) got 43%, not the majority. Choices (c) and (d) totaled 52.5%, which means the 𝗺𝗮𝗷𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 voted for a minimum suspension of 7 days. Elon then essentially invoked "rank choice" voting and ran a new poll with only the top two choices (a) now, and (b) 7 days. "Now" won, and he made good on it.
- modeless 4y ago
  Look, if you want to claim you are governing by poll and have people believe it then you can't change the rules after you start no matter how bad they are. It's far too easy to manipulate the result by adding or removing options after you know the voting trends. It's not as if this was that important of a decision anyway. There was no downside to simply respecting the first poll result and counting it as a lesson to think about the options a little harder next time.
- HmOh6WbJ 4y ago
  Yep Plurality is not necessarily majority
- saberdancer 4y ago
  Yes but the second poll lasted for 24 hours meaning the ban was effectively at least a day - which is option b) tomorrow I bet he expected to get clear majority for 7 days.
bmitc 4y ago
> I think this indicates he's tired of Twitter already. He’s also facing a huge amount of backlash, pent-up backlash, that he hasn’t experienced before or more successfully insulated himself from before. For example, when he was recently booed off stage. I saw someone comment elsewhere that he is also highly leveraged, and that if Twitter tanks and Tesla’s stock keeps falling, he stands to lose a lot of money and even potentially control of Tesla. I haven’t looked into the veracity of the argument, but it seems plausible that he’s in over his head in more ways than one.
schneems 4y ago
He has access to the databases. There’s no independent way to verify the results.
- hairofadog 4y ago
  Eh, for whatever reason I don’t think he’d do that. He’s in it for the chaos, and what says chaos more than letting a Twitter mob decide who should be ceo?
  - schneems 4y ago
    Whether you think he would or not he’s not given me any reason to trust him about anything ever again. As a bonus he did get me to quit my Twitter habit after over a decade. Now that I’ve built up a good size list of people to follow on mastodon I actually like it more. I understand the point is he’s hoping people will log back in to engage. But I’m just done. Even if he steps down his actions have shown what a massive single point of failure the whole thing is. So I guess what I’m saying is: the fact that he controls everything is more the problem than whether he will exercise this one specific control.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> I think he only posts polls when he believes he knows the outcome already. Agreed, and this move would almost certainly be more of a distraction than an actual stepping down. Whoever is put in charge will still be under Elon’s thumb, but with a different person in the CEO seat, Elon can pass blame for the bad decisions and ride in like a white knight to reverse any unpopular actions.
exodust 4y ago
> "and when the outcome wasn't what he wanted instead of following the majority vote" Not true, he changed the poll well before its conclusion. Then he abided by the majority vote and unbanned those users. But you're not happy, and need to make stuff up about what he did or didn't do. His latest poll deciding his own fate reveals the bold transparency approach. People can't handle transparency it seems. Almost like they want things decided behind closed doors that decide the terms they agree to. The world needs more transparency not less. It will be sad to see him step down, if the poll decides that. It's been highly entertaining. The outrage and temper tantrums sparked in entitled over-sensitive Twitter users and commentators, is quality popcorn material. Must the curtain close?
- mcphage 4y ago
  > The outrage and temper tantrums sparked in entitled over-sensitive Twitter users and commentators, is quality popcorn material. Must the curtain close? I do mostly agree with you—Musk's outrage and temper tantrums have been pretty funny. This is probably been the funniest time Twitter has, just weeks of everyone dunking on him and watching him flail in rage. But honestly, it's getting kind of tiresome. Every time the conversation moves on to something else, he bans someone or adds some new rules or gets mad about something, to keep himself in the center of attention. I think it's probably time to close the curtains.
  - exodust 4y ago
    Actual outrage from users, including celebrity meltdowns and viral whinging. The amount of users threatening to leave, linking to their tumble-weed infested Mastodons is hilarious. All Musk did was rattle cages with a few truth bombs and mild trolling. Entertaining stuff. Anyone voting "yes" takes life way too seriously. Not to mention devaluing the insights of Twitter Files and FBI-tweaked moderation processes and staffer ideology influence. It's good to see all that exposed in the light. Musk did the dirty work that was needed.
    - mcphage 4y ago
      > It's good to see all that exposed in the light. Musk did the dirty work that was needed. The twitter files did reveal the kind of insider access that powerful people get to journalists in order to push a narrative, but I do wish he had accomplished that without doing the exact same thing he was complaining about—giving journalists insider access to power in order to push a narrative.
xu_ituairo 4y ago
It made sense to remove the first poll. It wasn’t constructed in the best way. The revision was warranted in my opinion, and doesn’t necessarily show that he was being tricksy.

drexlspivey 4y ago

My money is on David Sacks if we would take the job (probably not)

cactusplant7374 4y ago
Somewhat ironically, Chamath, Calacanis, and Sacks can spot a bad deal.
- steve_adams_86 4y ago
  Why ironically? (Genuinely curious)
  - cactusplant7374 4y ago
    Chamath has his SPACs and Calacanis has his syndicate. They know how to craft deals that benefit them over other investors. I assume Sacks does the same with his investments. They know a bad deal because they are usually the ones crafting them.

pseudo0 4y ago

It seems like it would be the smart move to hire someone with expertise in social media, give them his high-level vision, and let them implement the details. The last few weeks of Elon's micromanagement have been a complete shitshow.

wmf 4y ago
Everyone with expertise in social media hates Elon's high-level vision.
- BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
  Depends what we mean by his high-level vision. If it's the "everything app", I'd say that vision is not bad by default, but the details matter. But if his high-level vision is described by his actions so far... oh my God, yeah, no one would wanna touch that with a thousand mile pole.
  - sqlcommando 4y ago
    "Everything app" seems like a great vision. Let's not get hung up on the details of, you know... everything.
    - ssnistfajen 4y ago
      It's fun to think about until you realize building the company/service portofolio that can support a mega-app would almost certainly attract ire from regulators even within the U.S., ignoring the amount of capital investment required to achieve it. Plus, Uber/Spotify/Doordash/Yelp can barely turn a profit as-is. What incentives will the everything app offer to pull consumers away from these existing competitors other than subsidizing the services with VC money, which would only worsen profitability and sustainability?
      - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
        Let's imagine Google Cloud, AWS, Azure are resp. Google's / Amazon's / Microsoft's everything apps. They are managing to handle the regulatory weight of supporting applications of all kinds of nature, and if you rethink Twitter as a platform you can do the same as well. Many things are possible, and the Twitter app today may even continue to work as-is. But underneath it will be able to power more apps and more use cases, all tied under a common cohesive set of interactive primitives, much higher level than what cloud applications today support. This means less to reinvent, less to rediscover, and easier more natural integration between apps, services and components. It'd be a lot of work, definitely not a 2-3 month project. So you'd need also a survival strategy that keeps Twitter 1.0 working and profitable.

ratio11 4y ago

Absolutely. This is one last attempt to frame his failure and giving up as being his dedication to “vox populi”.

minimaxir 4y ago
Right after a massively unpopular policy decision. He can't control the narrative anymore.

croon 4y ago

Also he can trivially determine the outcome of said poll if he wants too. It's incredibly insincere to even pretend to use them.

calcifer 4y ago
I don't think he'd dare. Everything he says internally gets leaked immediately, no way he'd order someone to mess with poll data.
- croon 4y ago
  Maybe, or maybe not, but the fact of the matter is that a poll in a private platform does not a vote make, and using it as such for varying degrees of impactful events is either irresponsible or willfully deceptive.
- Lerc 4y ago
  I believe the ship might have sailed on the "I don't think he'd dare" argument. I can't help but think he's in quite an unhealthy mental state at the moment.

minimaxir 4y ago

Last month he implied he was looking for a successor: https://www.axios.com/2022/11/16/elon-musk-twitter-ceo-new-leader https://www.axios.com/2022/11/16/elon-musk-twitter-ceo-new-l... Although I'm not sure who would want to run Twitter now.

modeless 4y ago
Interesting. Maybe he found the CEO he wants earlier than expected. That would make sense. If the poll says so he can step down immediately, and if not then he can still step down later whenever he feels like. Of course he still maintains ultimate control either way but he can go back to focusing on SpaceX and Tesla more, either immediately or maybe in a few months. So in this case he may not believe he knows the outcome ahead of time, but it doesn't matter because the outcome is the same either way. Only the timing is different.
aaronbrethorst 4y ago
I'm sure any of the goons who helped plan this debacle after he was forced to buy^H^H^H make good on his agreement to buy it would be delighted to run it.
- mastax 4y ago
  He wasn't forced to buy Twitter. He bought Twitter and then was indirectly forced to follow through with the purchase contract that he already made.
philippejara 4y ago
I can guarantee you there are plenty of people who do, you really don't need an ex-social media CEO or whatever to do it. Would be absolutely hilarious if he somehow managed to get moot to be the CEO.
layer8 4y ago
> Although I'm not sure who would want to run Twitter now. Especially while continually being at Elon’s mercy.

tootie 4y ago

As someone who has muted his account, it's already baked in that only his followers are voting.

xenospn 4y ago
I muted his account months ago, but still got the retweets. I voted yes, which seems to be getting momentum and is now leading by a very comfortable margin.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  Same. I have Musk muted, but I saw a mention of the poll in a tweet by geohotz, so I went and found it (and voted "yes"). And I'm sure some Musk critics decided not to mute him anyway. Hell, I only finally got annoyed enough to do it about a week ago.
- netsharc 4y ago
  I'd prefer "no" wins and that he's stuck with his fuck up a few more weeks/months... if "yes" wins, he gets his cheap way out without losing face...
  - xenospn 4y ago
    The time to "not lose face" was months ago.
- tootie 4y ago
  If you mute, the rewtweets will be masked unless you reveal them. I saw this one because it was on HN before it closed. I never saw the previous polls until they were closed.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  I have him blocked. Surprisingly, I can still click through and it looks like I could vote if I wanted to (which feels like a bug, but, eh, probably not Twitter's biggest issue right now).

robofanatic 4y ago

not too long ago he claimed that spam and bot accounts make up an estimated 11% of Twitter’s total user base, I don't think that has changed much so I agree these polls are simply a farce.

ckastner 4y ago

It does seem so, and hilariously, it appears to be backfiring. "As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it" https://notabird.site/elonmusk/status/1604623424164282368 https://notabird.site/elonmusk/status/1604623424164282368

czbond 4y ago
He doesn't want to lead Twitter... social media is a junk hole mostly filled with lowest common denominator users. He's definitely tired of the stupid issues on both sides that are filled with entitled users and whiners. It's a lose lose, let someone else fill their day with that.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  He bought Twitter. From day one he didn’t need to be CEO. But he chose to immediately show up and make big changes, both in personnel and in the platform itself. He doesn’t need a poll to hire somebody else to run the company.
cactusplant7374 4y ago
He can take as long as he wants to find a replacement. There aren’t many that can do to Twitter’s revenue what he did to Twitter’s revenue.

hobbitstan 4y ago

He can likely manipulate the results on the backend anyway. This is a real cowardly way to make decisions, by pretending they come from someone else.

j_crick 4y ago
Some people have different modes of making decisions and framing the results, like all good outcomes being on them and all bad outcomes being due to external circumstances and “wasn’t me”. You think that’s cowardice (and assume morals), for other people it could be just convenience
dylan604 4y ago
Clearly, the vote count is full of fraud because all of the users are bots anyways, yeah? In the pools of thought that Elon floats in, it would only be more fraudulent if Dominion was conducting the poll.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  Elon even said himself while running the Trump resurrection poll that there were so many bots voting. It's somewhat bizarre.

pantalaimon 4y ago

> But he still owns it, so who will he put in his place? Lex Fridman just volunteered https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1604627087385661440 https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1604627087385661440

JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
Amazing this guy was ready to get on his knees for Putin up until January. Lots of stuff are known about Putin since 2000 till January 2022, some perhaps even worse than Ukraine invasion For sure he has a soft spot for Autocrats both in Moscow and in San Francisco
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  > Amazing this guy was ready to get on his knees for Putin up until January. What do you mean exactly? > For sure he has a soft spot for Autocrats both in Moscow and in San Francisco The West establishment has a soft spot for autocrats: whitewashing the wealth of oligarchs, buying cheap oil stolen from common people, selling anti-protest crowd control gear and tear gas, etc, etc; even though "lots of stuff are known about Putin since 2000 till January 2022, some perhaps even worse than Ukraine invasion". I don't think Lex has done or has expressed a wish to do anything comparable to that.
  - JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
    > > I don't think Lex has done or has expressed a wish to do anything comparable to that. Every video of his that YT pushes in my feed I see Putin in the thumbnail with sunglasses and behind a huge explosion Like it’s cool or something that an autocrat with a cult of personality controls 5000 nukes
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      > Every video of his that YT pushes in my feed I see Putin in the thumbnail with sunglasses and behind a huge explosion I just scrolled through the past 8 years of thumbnails on his main channel and the past year of thumbnails on his clips channel. The thumbnail you describe doesn't exist. What I found is that he has several thumbnails of Putin looking stern, but without any sunglasses or nuclear blasts. (He also has thumbnails of Hitler and Stalin looking stern, but I don't take that to suggest he's simultaneously a communist and a nazi.) Additionally he has several videos with nuclear blast thumbnails, but none of them have anybody superimposed on front of the explosion. And he doesn't have any meme-like photoshopped sunglasses thumbnails. That sort of meme thumbnail doesn't seem to be his style. (I didn't watch any of these videos because I can't stand Lex, so I can't comment on what he actually says. But the sort of thumbnail you're describing just isn't his style.)

jakear 4y ago

Changing the prior poll made sense. The options were “unban immediately”, “unban in a day”, “unban in a week”, “unban in some longer a lot of time”. The issue with this is obvious: there’s only one “you fucked up” option and the “I agree but let’s talk specifics” group is divided into three. So even though the majority of people said “I agree”, the “you fucked up” got the most votes. Classic first-past-the-post failure mode. That said, the later poll didn’t reflect this dynamic. My suspicion is that early on in polls the answers are likely to lean pro-Elon, as the votes are more likely to to be Twitter stan’s. As time goes by word of mouth spreads news of the poll to people who aren’t as active on twitter and accordingly are less likely to be pro-elon. It was the same with the “should I step down” poll, started out pro-Elon, flipped as popularity increased. https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603600001057185792 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/16036000010571857...

drumhead 4y ago

He's stuck with Twitter now, at an overinflated price. He'll never be able to make enough money from it to justify the valuation. Will he leave, no he wont, he'll still pull the strings from behind the scences. He just wont be doing it so publically anymore, he'll get a front to do it for him.

spamizbad 4y ago

He’s just going to put someone like Blake Masters or David Sacks in charge. Which, honestly, would be worse than old Twitter but better than erratic Elon Twitter.

fncivivue7 4y ago
"eratic Elon twitter" - ignoring the news, what exactly is erattic about twitter right now? Doesn't it basically work exactly the same?
- spamizbad 4y ago
  Rules dropping out of the blue around flight tracking, not being able to link to other social media sites, the confusing verification issue with all the fake/parody accounts, mass banning of journalists for linking to reporting he didn’t like etc. Old Twitter had none of this.

h11h 4y ago

The second poll about unbanning the journalists went for 24 hours (the first was only an hour or so), so even though "now" was the winning option, he still got the outcome he was looking for by giving them a 24+ hour suspension.

dylan604 4y ago
>he still got the outcome he was looking for what was that outcome? fewer people knowing about his childish behavior? no, that wasn't it. fewer people knowing about his private jet and the mechanisms of being able to track it. nope, didn't work that way either. showing the world he's a petulant little child that throws a hissy fit when he doesn't get his way. now we're getting somewhere.

czbond 4y ago

I thought Jason Calacanis was going to run it. He'd be much better.... also the type to not put up with crap - and not the type either to "run by committee".

madeofpalk 4y ago
He seems to be pretty happy with putting up with Musk's crap, as any sycophant would.
Raed667 4y ago
He definitely seems to like the flavor of Elon's shoe polish ... That should be qualification enough

hristov 4y ago

Of course he knows what the results will be. He owns twitter. He has all the admin passwords to the server that runs the poll. The admins that run the server answer to him. The result of this poll will be whatever Elon Musk wants it to be.

knighthack 4y ago
That's just silly. Passwords are stored encrypted. No way would they be able to even know what the passwords are, even if they know who the users are.
- Rury 4y ago
  Not at all. You don't even need other people's passwords or accounts to fake a poll. Just admin rights to the server, or a bunch of bots.
exodust 4y ago
Implausible conspiracy. Email to the admins: "Hey guys I'd like the results of the poll to be the following..." No chance. Interesting side note: Here in Australia this morning on the ABC public broadcaster's national News channel, one of the presenters said "if you hate Elon Musk, vote yes"... encouraging the mostly left-leaning ABC viewers to log on and vote Musk out. The poll will get swamped by this politically divisive Musk-hating recruitment drive, which is why the results stand as they are.
- hristov 4y ago
  Doesn't have to be an email. He can tell them in person. I am sure after all the layoffs he has found some engineers that are obedient/scared enough.
ratg13 4y ago
More like he wins either way ---- Yes = he gets to step away from the dumpster fire without it looking like it was his decision No = all of his previous decisions are justified

iconjack 4y ago

That is not what happened at all. In the first poll, he asked when the journalists should be unsuspended and the options were (a) now, (b) tomorrow, (c) in 7 days, and (d) longer. Choice (a) got 43%, not the majority. Choices (c) and (d) totaled 52.5%, which means the 𝗺𝗮𝗷𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 voted for a minimum suspension of 7 days. Elon then essentially invoked "rank choice" voting and ran a new poll with only the top two choices (a) now, and (b) 7 days. "Now" won, and he made good on it.

modeless 4y ago
Look, if you want to claim you are governing by poll and have people believe it then you can't change the rules after you start no matter how bad they are. It's far too easy to manipulate the result by adding or removing options after you know the voting trends. It's not as if this was that important of a decision anyway. There was no downside to simply respecting the first poll result and counting it as a lesson to think about the options a little harder next time.
HmOh6WbJ 4y ago
Yep Plurality is not necessarily majority
saberdancer 4y ago
Yes but the second poll lasted for 24 hours meaning the ban was effectively at least a day - which is option b) tomorrow I bet he expected to get clear majority for 7 days.

bmitc 4y ago

> I think this indicates he's tired of Twitter already. He’s also facing a huge amount of backlash, pent-up backlash, that he hasn’t experienced before or more successfully insulated himself from before. For example, when he was recently booed off stage. I saw someone comment elsewhere that he is also highly leveraged, and that if Twitter tanks and Tesla’s stock keeps falling, he stands to lose a lot of money and even potentially control of Tesla. I haven’t looked into the veracity of the argument, but it seems plausible that he’s in over his head in more ways than one.

schneems 4y ago

He has access to the databases. There’s no independent way to verify the results.

hairofadog 4y ago
Eh, for whatever reason I don’t think he’d do that. He’s in it for the chaos, and what says chaos more than letting a Twitter mob decide who should be ceo?
- schneems 4y ago
  Whether you think he would or not he’s not given me any reason to trust him about anything ever again. As a bonus he did get me to quit my Twitter habit after over a decade. Now that I’ve built up a good size list of people to follow on mastodon I actually like it more. I understand the point is he’s hoping people will log back in to engage. But I’m just done. Even if he steps down his actions have shown what a massive single point of failure the whole thing is. So I guess what I’m saying is: the fact that he controls everything is more the problem than whether he will exercise this one specific control.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> I think he only posts polls when he believes he knows the outcome already. Agreed, and this move would almost certainly be more of a distraction than an actual stepping down. Whoever is put in charge will still be under Elon’s thumb, but with a different person in the CEO seat, Elon can pass blame for the bad decisions and ride in like a white knight to reverse any unpopular actions.

exodust 4y ago

> "and when the outcome wasn't what he wanted instead of following the majority vote" Not true, he changed the poll well before its conclusion. Then he abided by the majority vote and unbanned those users. But you're not happy, and need to make stuff up about what he did or didn't do. His latest poll deciding his own fate reveals the bold transparency approach. People can't handle transparency it seems. Almost like they want things decided behind closed doors that decide the terms they agree to. The world needs more transparency not less. It will be sad to see him step down, if the poll decides that. It's been highly entertaining. The outrage and temper tantrums sparked in entitled over-sensitive Twitter users and commentators, is quality popcorn material. Must the curtain close?

mcphage 4y ago
> The outrage and temper tantrums sparked in entitled over-sensitive Twitter users and commentators, is quality popcorn material. Must the curtain close? I do mostly agree with you—Musk's outrage and temper tantrums have been pretty funny. This is probably been the funniest time Twitter has, just weeks of everyone dunking on him and watching him flail in rage. But honestly, it's getting kind of tiresome. Every time the conversation moves on to something else, he bans someone or adds some new rules or gets mad about something, to keep himself in the center of attention. I think it's probably time to close the curtains.
- exodust 4y ago
  Actual outrage from users, including celebrity meltdowns and viral whinging. The amount of users threatening to leave, linking to their tumble-weed infested Mastodons is hilarious. All Musk did was rattle cages with a few truth bombs and mild trolling. Entertaining stuff. Anyone voting "yes" takes life way too seriously. Not to mention devaluing the insights of Twitter Files and FBI-tweaked moderation processes and staffer ideology influence. It's good to see all that exposed in the light. Musk did the dirty work that was needed.
  - mcphage 4y ago
    > It's good to see all that exposed in the light. Musk did the dirty work that was needed. The twitter files did reveal the kind of insider access that powerful people get to journalists in order to push a narrative, but I do wish he had accomplished that without doing the exact same thing he was complaining about—giving journalists insider access to power in order to push a narrative.

xu_ituairo 4y ago

It made sense to remove the first poll. It wasn’t constructed in the best way. The revision was warranted in my opinion, and doesn’t necessarily show that he was being tricksy.