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Musk’s Twitter poll says he should step down

70 points by crhulls 4y ago

eukara 4y ago
https://archive.vn/5WQjm https://archive.vn/5WQjm
plaidfuji 4y ago
Things that seem to be clear at this point: - Musk has at least some level of interest in solving the fundamental problem of how to build and manage a public square, even if the purchase of twitter itself was initially presented as a joke - despite having a clear, at least quasi-principled interest in the topic, his actual attempts to manage twitter have been juvenile and ham-handed at best and if continued are almost certain to doom the platform both financially and engagement-wise - his recent activity indicates that he’s not oblivious to this fact - it’s a sinking ship and he openly acknowledges it - but does he view himself as some kind of uniquely-qualified savior? At this point there are still more questions than answers. Will he actually step down? Who would replace him and what could they possibly hope to achieve at this point? Will the inevitable devaluation of Twitter stock take down Tesla with it? Will the other stakeholders in Tesla acquiesce to a humbled Musk returning to business as usual, or will this taint him forever? Has his behavior irreparably damaged the Tesla brand? Does any of this actually matter?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Who will pay for the shortfall? The bills Twitter runs up won't pay themselves and I don't see it recovering from the tailspin that Musk has put it in. Who is at the helm may no longer be all that important.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    If they reverse Musk's policies, Twitter could return to profitability and paying its debt. Twitter's problem is that if new management does reverse Musk's policies, Musk would just fire them like he did the previous people running the company, costing the company more golden parachutes and leaving it even worse off.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Precisely. As long as Musk owns it I don't see Twitter as salvageable, and even afterwards, you have to wonder who he gave access to the data. Twitter is now a time bomb for any future owner.
    - spacemadness 4y ago
      Wasn’t Twitter’s policies prior to Musk essentially a reversal of Musks policies already? Would that really do it on its own?
    - hejaodbsidndbd 4y ago
      You haven’t been paying attention. Elon has made Twitter’s debt situation so much worth that even if they could do a full reset to what the company was like before he acquired it, they would still be on the fast path to bankruptcy. It has been such a colossally fucking stupid move. He needs to be checked into rehab for his substance abuse before he loses it all.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > Twitter could return to profitability and paying its debt. Twitter was profitable in 2018-2019, but that was a brief blip and wasn't profitable before or afterwards. And, with a bunch of debt piled on from the acquisition, they need a fair bit of operating profit to cover it.
      - lern_too_spel 4y ago
        https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-income-quarterly/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  > Things that seem to be clear at this point: > - Musk has at least some level of interest in solving the fundamental problem of how to build and manage a public square, even if the purchase of twitter itself was initially presented as a joke It’s interesting how different people can see the same thing and reach opposite conclusions. It’s crystal clear to me that Musk has no interest in solving these problems.
  - plaidfuji 4y ago
    The evidence is very noisy, for sure. My only basis for this is the private text exchange with Jack Dorsey where they discussed how Twitter should have been built. To me that’s the only true window into his intentions - all other public comms are tainted by other potential motivations. To me, Musk is kind of the quintessential engineering bro, who’s fundamentally motivated by wanting to be the one who solves the trickiest problems. Sometimes his actual decision-making is influenced by vanity and voyeurism, but the underlying theme seems to be rooted in problem-solving.
    - bmitc 4y ago
      It's not noisy at all. It's perfectly clear. > My only basis for this is the private text exchange with Jack Dorsey where they discussed how Twitter should have been built. To me that’s the only true window into his intentions - all other public comms are tainted by other potential motivations. You have to understand that text message thread in context. It's two narcissistic billionaires who think they're above everyone else talking to each other. It's a sort of billionaire pissing contest where they both also pat each other on the back. It's two people thinking they're the smartest in the room. It just so happens they were the only ones in the room. For Dorsey, if he knew how Twitter should have been built since the beginning, then why didn't he do so? He claims to have known this from the start, but he was in full control for years. Musk was just chiming in to showcase that he gets it, whatever it is.
    - gamblor956 4y ago
      And yet, Musk has never solved "the trickiest problems." He simply does "first order thinking" that conveniently ignores the real issues with whatever he claims he's solving. (See, e.g., Hyperloop, Boring Co, Cybertruck, FSD, Tesla's robotic factory, the cave submarine, etc.) At every step of the way, Musk is just cosplaying as an engineer and interfering with the actual work being done.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  Also Twitter peaked in its traffic rankings recently which is weird timing to buy something. Why was he so insanely late to the party?
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > a public square I must be out of touch or have a dead imagination but I have no clue what this means/what this looks like hypothetically.
  - baandang 4y ago
    Hundreds of thousands of people screaming at each other. It really needs a better model because the idea of scaling up the town square is just a terrible idea.
    - gardenfelder 4y ago
      Robin Dunbar must be laughing now...
    - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
      How about... a recursive network of medium-sized public squares.
  - adamrezich 4y ago
    it's the Section 230 platform/publisher conundrum, which itself is kind of just a moral-positioning smokescreen for "we want advertisers to buy ads on our website and advertisers don't want their ads to appear alongside objectionable content".
    - JakeTheAndroid 4y ago
      And I am again forced to ask this silly question, but what are you referencing in regards to Section 230? There is no such delineation that is made as part of Section 230[0] and there is no legal definition for being a platform. Thusly there is no conundrum here. This is a talking point that got beat dead in 2020 and I am shocked that it still has any life on HackerNews. It's not only moral positioning, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes someone a publisher and what is actually covered as part of Section 230. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-it-doesnt-matter https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...
- aaroninsf 4y ago
  Contemporary social media is not a "public square." Weaponized speech is real, and "more speech" is zero defense against it. Content moderation is a hard problem, in multiple dimensions, and blundering erratically from rookie mistake into rookie mistake serves by design or by accident mostly to enable and empower the worst exploitation, and the worst voices. The pretense that there is some design and genius behind pathetic Dunning-Kruger narcissism and cognitive errors and neurological deficits has expired. How's that anagram go, "a man, no plan, root canal: painful yawn"?
- papito 4y ago
  "quasi-principled interest". That's not even near that. It's all been hypocritical through the through. "Free speech" is "me speech". The man doesn't even know about Section 230 and referred to Twitter as a "publisher". He is completely clueless as to what it is that he bought for $44 billion. Most of us spend more due diligence buying a coffee grinder.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    I continue to be amazed how much vitriol Musk manages to stir up by being an arbitrary agent of chaos for the wrong side. Who cares if he wastes $44B? If anything, he's fighting inflation by removing mistakenly-assigned value of $44B from circulation.
    - papito 4y ago
      It's him - he assigned the value.
    - ryanwaggoner 4y ago
      I care for a number of reasons: 1. I had friends at Twitter who were laid off 2. I actually do think Twitter has value 3. I don’t think Elon is good for public discourse 4. I don’t think Elon is good for tech culture 5. I think we’d all be better off if he STFU and went back to working on rockets and electric cars.
ladyattis 4y ago
Elon clearly needs a team of non-yes-folks to coordinate any/all changes on Twitter. For example, the most recent attempt to solve 'spam' on Twitter was a blanket ban on linking to content from Facebook, Instagram, and link aggregators like Linktree. Thankfully, someone who I don't like (The Quartering) stepped in and explained how that was a bad idea and Musk backed off the policy change. Still, the fact Elon Musk thinks Twitter should be AOL 2.0 means he's not fit for purpose as CEO of Twitter. The Internet today is heavily dependent on crossplatform linking and interoperation. Imagine if Facebook tomorrow banned all links to Youtube channels just to force its users to use whatever video service they cooked up? Facebook would implode despite having 2 billion users as Youtube is such an important video sharing site that to block/ban links to it from Facebook would be like banning users from having a TV in their living rooms in real life. It just doesn't make sense and it was such a gross miscalculation that if someone was there to vet the idea from Musk then it wouldn't have survived as is or even gotten proposed.
rurban 4y ago
My bet is on Jack now
- neuronexmachina 4y ago
  If Mudge/Zatko's complaint from a few months ago is accurate, that doesn't seem like a great idea: https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-whistleblower-jack-dorsey-ceo-agrawal-mismanaged-company-2022-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-whistleblower-jack-d... > Zatko's complaint accuses the CEO of exhibiting "absent behavior" and a "drastic loss of focus" in his last year as Twitter CEO. > Zatko also said Dorsey was a "disengaged" leader who only "sporadically" showed up to meetings — and when he did, he sometimes didn't say a word. Sometimes he'd appear to go missing and wouldn't respond to his teams for "days or weeks," the complaint said. > Top brass worried about his health and tried to cover up for him, but "even mid- and lower-level staff could tell that the ship was rudderless," the complaint said.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Compared to the last couple of weeks that sounds like a fantastic improvement.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
  Jack is as naive as they come. His focus is on sounding bombastic and sending good vibes about "extending the light of consciousness" while being quite average as a CEO. Twitter won't survive with an average CEO at this point. Maybe 6 weeks ago.
VincentEvans 4y ago
Here’s my takeaway: Musk overestimated both his own abilities and the influence he commands as it relates to being able to NOT run twitter into the ground. Now he is faced with a predicament that every time he touches, tweets, or says something (which are all tinged with the same obnoxious flavor that is his brand and has worked for him until now and one he seems to be unable and unwilling to moderate when situation calls for it) - despite the ejaculatory noises his fanbase makes - “twitter as a business” nosedives further. So now he is looking to distance himself, however much possible that might be, as to not be associated too closely with what is looking ever more like a failure, and possibly find someone who can actually run twitter in a boring and even-keeled manner, banning the same old crowd we are all used to being banned - and if that succeeds - tweet from sidelines pretending as if things are out of his hands, and then still show up when the ‘uge success awards are being handed out. The outcome of the poll would not have influenced his departure, but now conveniently offers a “people have spoken” excuse.
whateveracct 4y ago
> I will abide by the results of this poll.
MonkeyClub 4y ago
It's OK, even if Elon steps down, Lex Fridman offered to run the show pro bono: > Let me run Twitter for a bit. No salary. All in. Focus on great engineering and increasing the amount of love in the world. (https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1604624131626090497 https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1604624131626090497)
- matt-attack 4y ago
  Funny but I wouldn’t think that Lex is remotely qualified to rebuild and lead Twitter.
  - strikelaserclaw 4y ago
    lex is a total yes man
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Maybe it'll crash slower?
    - MonkeyClub 4y ago
      Thinking of the Futurama Slow-Mobile, it'll certainly be slower, while it's surely crashing. But I would definitely buy into that show - Lex for CEO has my +1.
  - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
    I've noticed some time ago Lex isn't the brightest person, despite he tried to present himself as one. But he was a good show host. His sycophantic behavior in the last 6 weeks has been quite off-putting. Yes, let's cheer and clap for everything Elon Musk does, and then say "hey, we're friends, how about I become the CEO?" Absurd.
tromp 4y ago
The no vote could well be biased by people enjoying the schadenfreude of watching Elon's train wreck in slow motion.

70 points by crhulls 4y ago

https://archive.vn/5WQjm https://archive.vn/5WQjm

Things that seem to be clear at this point: - Musk has at least some level of interest in solving the fundamental problem of how to build and manage a public square, even if the purchase of twitter itself was initially presented as a joke - despite having a clear, at least quasi-principled interest in the topic, his actual attempts to manage twitter have been juvenile and ham-handed at best and if continued are almost certain to doom the platform both financially and engagement-wise - his recent activity indicates that he’s not oblivious to this fact - it’s a sinking ship and he openly acknowledges it - but does he view himself as some kind of uniquely-qualified savior? At this point there are still more questions than answers. Will he actually step down? Who would replace him and what could they possibly hope to achieve at this point? Will the inevitable devaluation of Twitter stock take down Tesla with it? Will the other stakeholders in Tesla acquiesce to a humbled Musk returning to business as usual, or will this taint him forever? Has his behavior irreparably damaged the Tesla brand? Does any of this actually matter?

jacquesm 4y ago
Who will pay for the shortfall? The bills Twitter runs up won't pay themselves and I don't see it recovering from the tailspin that Musk has put it in. Who is at the helm may no longer be all that important.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  If they reverse Musk's policies, Twitter could return to profitability and paying its debt. Twitter's problem is that if new management does reverse Musk's policies, Musk would just fire them like he did the previous people running the company, costing the company more golden parachutes and leaving it even worse off.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Precisely. As long as Musk owns it I don't see Twitter as salvageable, and even afterwards, you have to wonder who he gave access to the data. Twitter is now a time bomb for any future owner.
  - spacemadness 4y ago
    Wasn’t Twitter’s policies prior to Musk essentially a reversal of Musks policies already? Would that really do it on its own?
  - hejaodbsidndbd 4y ago
    You haven’t been paying attention. Elon has made Twitter’s debt situation so much worth that even if they could do a full reset to what the company was like before he acquired it, they would still be on the fast path to bankruptcy. It has been such a colossally fucking stupid move. He needs to be checked into rehab for his substance abuse before he loses it all.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > Twitter could return to profitability and paying its debt. Twitter was profitable in 2018-2019, but that was a brief blip and wasn't profitable before or afterwards. And, with a bunch of debt piled on from the acquisition, they need a fair bit of operating profit to cover it.
    - lern_too_spel 4y ago
      https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-income-quarterly/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...
CogitoCogito 4y ago
> Things that seem to be clear at this point: > - Musk has at least some level of interest in solving the fundamental problem of how to build and manage a public square, even if the purchase of twitter itself was initially presented as a joke It’s interesting how different people can see the same thing and reach opposite conclusions. It’s crystal clear to me that Musk has no interest in solving these problems.
- plaidfuji 4y ago
  The evidence is very noisy, for sure. My only basis for this is the private text exchange with Jack Dorsey where they discussed how Twitter should have been built. To me that’s the only true window into his intentions - all other public comms are tainted by other potential motivations. To me, Musk is kind of the quintessential engineering bro, who’s fundamentally motivated by wanting to be the one who solves the trickiest problems. Sometimes his actual decision-making is influenced by vanity and voyeurism, but the underlying theme seems to be rooted in problem-solving.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    It's not noisy at all. It's perfectly clear. > My only basis for this is the private text exchange with Jack Dorsey where they discussed how Twitter should have been built. To me that’s the only true window into his intentions - all other public comms are tainted by other potential motivations. You have to understand that text message thread in context. It's two narcissistic billionaires who think they're above everyone else talking to each other. It's a sort of billionaire pissing contest where they both also pat each other on the back. It's two people thinking they're the smartest in the room. It just so happens they were the only ones in the room. For Dorsey, if he knew how Twitter should have been built since the beginning, then why didn't he do so? He claims to have known this from the start, but he was in full control for years. Musk was just chiming in to showcase that he gets it, whatever it is.
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    And yet, Musk has never solved "the trickiest problems." He simply does "first order thinking" that conveniently ignores the real issues with whatever he claims he's solving. (See, e.g., Hyperloop, Boring Co, Cybertruck, FSD, Tesla's robotic factory, the cave submarine, etc.) At every step of the way, Musk is just cosplaying as an engineer and interfering with the actual work being done.
birdyrooster 4y ago
Also Twitter peaked in its traffic rankings recently which is weird timing to buy something. Why was he so insanely late to the party?
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> a public square I must be out of touch or have a dead imagination but I have no clue what this means/what this looks like hypothetically.
- baandang 4y ago
  Hundreds of thousands of people screaming at each other. It really needs a better model because the idea of scaling up the town square is just a terrible idea.
  - gardenfelder 4y ago
    Robin Dunbar must be laughing now...
  - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
    How about... a recursive network of medium-sized public squares.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  it's the Section 230 platform/publisher conundrum, which itself is kind of just a moral-positioning smokescreen for "we want advertisers to buy ads on our website and advertisers don't want their ads to appear alongside objectionable content".
  - JakeTheAndroid 4y ago
    And I am again forced to ask this silly question, but what are you referencing in regards to Section 230? There is no such delineation that is made as part of Section 230[0] and there is no legal definition for being a platform. Thusly there is no conundrum here. This is a talking point that got beat dead in 2020 and I am shocked that it still has any life on HackerNews. It's not only moral positioning, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes someone a publisher and what is actually covered as part of Section 230. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-it-doesnt-matter https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...
aaroninsf 4y ago
Contemporary social media is not a "public square." Weaponized speech is real, and "more speech" is zero defense against it. Content moderation is a hard problem, in multiple dimensions, and blundering erratically from rookie mistake into rookie mistake serves by design or by accident mostly to enable and empower the worst exploitation, and the worst voices. The pretense that there is some design and genius behind pathetic Dunning-Kruger narcissism and cognitive errors and neurological deficits has expired. How's that anagram go, "a man, no plan, root canal: painful yawn"?
papito 4y ago
"quasi-principled interest". That's not even near that. It's all been hypocritical through the through. "Free speech" is "me speech". The man doesn't even know about Section 230 and referred to Twitter as a "publisher". He is completely clueless as to what it is that he bought for $44 billion. Most of us spend more due diligence buying a coffee grinder.
- mbg721 4y ago
  I continue to be amazed how much vitriol Musk manages to stir up by being an arbitrary agent of chaos for the wrong side. Who cares if he wastes $44B? If anything, he's fighting inflation by removing mistakenly-assigned value of $44B from circulation.
  - papito 4y ago
    It's him - he assigned the value.
  - ryanwaggoner 4y ago
    I care for a number of reasons: 1. I had friends at Twitter who were laid off 2. I actually do think Twitter has value 3. I don’t think Elon is good for public discourse 4. I don’t think Elon is good for tech culture 5. I think we’d all be better off if he STFU and went back to working on rockets and electric cars.

ladyattis 4y ago

Elon clearly needs a team of non-yes-folks to coordinate any/all changes on Twitter. For example, the most recent attempt to solve 'spam' on Twitter was a blanket ban on linking to content from Facebook, Instagram, and link aggregators like Linktree. Thankfully, someone who I don't like (The Quartering) stepped in and explained how that was a bad idea and Musk backed off the policy change. Still, the fact Elon Musk thinks Twitter should be AOL 2.0 means he's not fit for purpose as CEO of Twitter. The Internet today is heavily dependent on crossplatform linking and interoperation. Imagine if Facebook tomorrow banned all links to Youtube channels just to force its users to use whatever video service they cooked up? Facebook would implode despite having 2 billion users as Youtube is such an important video sharing site that to block/ban links to it from Facebook would be like banning users from having a TV in their living rooms in real life. It just doesn't make sense and it was such a gross miscalculation that if someone was there to vet the idea from Musk then it wouldn't have survived as is or even gotten proposed.

rurban 4y ago

My bet is on Jack now

neuronexmachina 4y ago
If Mudge/Zatko's complaint from a few months ago is accurate, that doesn't seem like a great idea: https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-whistleblower-jack-dorsey-ceo-agrawal-mismanaged-company-2022-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-whistleblower-jack-d... > Zatko's complaint accuses the CEO of exhibiting "absent behavior" and a "drastic loss of focus" in his last year as Twitter CEO. > Zatko also said Dorsey was a "disengaged" leader who only "sporadically" showed up to meetings — and when he did, he sometimes didn't say a word. Sometimes he'd appear to go missing and wouldn't respond to his teams for "days or weeks," the complaint said. > Top brass worried about his health and tried to cover up for him, but "even mid- and lower-level staff could tell that the ship was rudderless," the complaint said.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Compared to the last couple of weeks that sounds like a fantastic improvement.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
Jack is as naive as they come. His focus is on sounding bombastic and sending good vibes about "extending the light of consciousness" while being quite average as a CEO. Twitter won't survive with an average CEO at this point. Maybe 6 weeks ago.

VincentEvans 4y ago

Here’s my takeaway: Musk overestimated both his own abilities and the influence he commands as it relates to being able to NOT run twitter into the ground. Now he is faced with a predicament that every time he touches, tweets, or says something (which are all tinged with the same obnoxious flavor that is his brand and has worked for him until now and one he seems to be unable and unwilling to moderate when situation calls for it) - despite the ejaculatory noises his fanbase makes - “twitter as a business” nosedives further. So now he is looking to distance himself, however much possible that might be, as to not be associated too closely with what is looking ever more like a failure, and possibly find someone who can actually run twitter in a boring and even-keeled manner, banning the same old crowd we are all used to being banned - and if that succeeds - tweet from sidelines pretending as if things are out of his hands, and then still show up when the ‘uge success awards are being handed out. The outcome of the poll would not have influenced his departure, but now conveniently offers a “people have spoken” excuse.

whateveracct 4y ago

> I will abide by the results of this poll.

MonkeyClub 4y ago

It's OK, even if Elon steps down, Lex Fridman offered to run the show pro bono: > Let me run Twitter for a bit. No salary. All in. Focus on great engineering and increasing the amount of love in the world. (https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1604624131626090497 https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1604624131626090497)

matt-attack 4y ago
Funny but I wouldn’t think that Lex is remotely qualified to rebuild and lead Twitter.
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  lex is a total yes man
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Maybe it'll crash slower?
  - MonkeyClub 4y ago
    Thinking of the Futurama Slow-Mobile, it'll certainly be slower, while it's surely crashing. But I would definitely buy into that show - Lex for CEO has my +1.
- BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
  I've noticed some time ago Lex isn't the brightest person, despite he tried to present himself as one. But he was a good show host. His sycophantic behavior in the last 6 weeks has been quite off-putting. Yes, let's cheer and clap for everything Elon Musk does, and then say "hey, we're friends, how about I become the CEO?" Absurd.

tromp 4y ago

The no vote could well be biased by people enjoying the schadenfreude of watching Elon's train wreck in slow motion.