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I don't understand why Musk didn't wait a few months for things to settle down before raising hell at Twitter. Before he bought it people were saying "He's gonn

• jameskilton 4y ago
  Because to him this isn't "raising hell", this is "solving Twitter". But he's still not capable of understanding that social media is actually a far, far harder problem than cars or even rocket science. Specifically, social media does not have an end goal, like a car on the road or getting people into and back home from space safely. Social media is infinitely messy because that's what we humans are, and you can't "fix" that.
  • causi 4y ago
    Even if he was totally right he was aware that most people thought he was wrong. It's insane to make advertisers and investors think you're a lunatic whether or not you actually are when your income is dependent on those advertisers.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  Waiting would probably meant bigger losses in time. If you want to refactor a business, better do it quick.
  • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    I think refactor might be the wrong term here - typically if you want to refactor something you have to know what it's doing and why it's broken. In my uninformed opinion it seems like the changes happened so fast there was no time for that initial evaluation.
• drcongo 4y ago
  My main takeaway from watching him fumble around haplessly at Twitter is that there's not a chance in hell that I'd ever get in a car built by a company that he runs like that, let alone a rocket.
  • coffeebeqn 4y ago
    Credit where credit is due - he’s very good at manufacturing. I don’t think the software has ever been the strong point for Musks businesses. Infamous self driving mode being the most obvious example. Twitter is pretty much just software (and a few data centers?) so not playing to his strengths. Of course he got himself in this mess with his ego
    • drcongo 4y ago
      There's an awful lot of software involved in his cars and rockets too though, and what has been very obvious in his time at Twitter is that he's perfectly happy to demand a new feature be added in a stupidly short timeframe but apparently incapable of either thinking through the consequences of adding it, or listening to someone who can.
      • JoachimS 4y ago
        Would be interesting to know how such demands are handled at Tesla and SpaceX. Twitter, being a company he just bought, not was part of building up, may not have the same mechanism and culture to handle these things.
    • kibwen 4y ago
      > he’s very good at manufacturing Tesla's quality control is infamously bad. Rather, Musk is very good at marketing, being able to project his reality distortion field far enough to sell shoddily-manufactured cars for luxury-car prices.
      • tablespoon 4y ago
        >> he’s very good at manufacturing > Tesla's quality control is infamously bad. Also I believe SpaceX is effectively run by other (competent) people, and Musk stays out of the rocketry part.
• phiy 4y ago
  It's fascinating to watch him learning in real time as he is experiments and bring his own experience to it. He has been a successful executive for a tech company before, Tesla is just a tech company that sells cars. Now social media He came in shook it up and innovated. Facebook copied his subscription idea. Other social media companies are likely to follow. He has already changed the industry, and where it goes, he probably doesn't even know
  • coffeebeqn 4y ago
    It’s an interesting turning point for social media. It’s not like Meta is doing any better and among smart people I know, no one is excited about social media and most have stopped using it in favor of smaller group communications
    • bawolff 4y ago
      Meta seems to betting big on VR and failing. I'm not sure that its instrinsically about social media so much as a bad pivot.
  • petargyurov 4y ago
    Facebook copying his questionable subscription model is hardly evidence for "innovation". If anything it's the opposite -- it shows big corps just copy each other as a safety mechanism -- something we've already seen with the large rounds of lay-offs.
  • blitzar 4y ago
    > "his subscription idea" https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/introducing-twitter-blue https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/introduci... Musk innovated at twitter years before he ever bid on twitter, amazing skills.
  • renewedrebecca 4y ago
    “Learning” is an interesting way of saying “running into the ground”
• kevinmchugh 4y ago
  There's no understanding what he's done, really. He could've pursued a traditional m&a strategy with real diligence and been able to back out when the market made it clear he was overpaying. He could've bought 10 or 15% and gotten a board seat and then gotten any information he wanted. A fun thing to think about: how much of what he accomplished in reality could he have accomplished if he'd only bought enough to get a board seat?
  • nocoiner 4y ago
    But he had exactly that option. He quite deliberately chose not to join the board when he learned about the obligations of corporate board members to shareholders as a whole. No doubt he would have been influential as a board member, but there’s no way he would have been able to change as much as he’s had (or get the rest of the board to accede to the massive vaporization of equity value).
• karmasimida 4y ago
  He made a mistake, and an expensive one. If he bought Twitter now, he probably only need 1/2 or 1/3 what he paid. Truth to be told, even the richest man in the world can’t predict the market
• snowwrestler 4y ago
  Because he bought a break-even business at an elevated price, on the precipice of an industry-wide decline, and saddled it with huge interest payments. He had no lever to pull to increase revenues that much, so he had to cut costs dramatically from day one and hope the business would stabilize at a smaller size. Remains to be seen if it will. There’s a reason he tried to get out of the purchase…