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I've run out of the mental energy to give Musk the benefit of the doubt. His capricious and poor decision-making is ruining one of my favorite products day and

by extr 4y ago

I've run out of the mental energy to give Musk the benefit of the doubt. His capricious and poor decision-making is ruining one of my favorite products day and day. It's so frustrating to watch, a complete train wreck in slow motion. I'm simultaneously beyond caring and unable to ignore it at this point.

hinkley 4y ago
I had a coworker who would have anger lines come out of his skull if you said Musk had anything to do with PayPal success. It was like Barney Stinson talking about Ralph Macchio. Then Tesla and SpaceX happened and I was like, “hmm, maybe he was wrong” and then Twitter happened and I’m thinking, “no, I get it now”.
- NhanH 4y ago
  Recently, I have a theory that Musk is a politician, not an entrepreneur. It just so happened that he wasn't born in the US to formally pursuit the politician career (yes, I know that President is nominally the only office limited to US-born citizen. That isn't the point, it's still vastly harder to be a high ranking politician without being born in the country) From that viewpoint, it makes sense as to how he could be successful in some venture and not so in others. The hypothesis would mean that he's very good at organizing, dealing with bureaucracy, doing PR etc. Not so much at actually building things, designing, engineering, or basically building consumer business.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    I have the opposite view. Musk is a fantastic engineer, but a terrible politician. He’s the kind of man who starts a rocket company and knows exactly how everything on the rocket works, but then impulsively smokes a joint on a podcast and risks his security clearance and defense funding to said rocket company. Musk has no political sense whatsoever, he’s far too impulsive. But the impulsiveness does make headlines which people mistake as media savvy. That’s how he got himself into this mess in the first place. Musk impulsively decided to offer to buy Twitter with no due diligence, then sensibly tried to back out when he came to his senses (helped a bit by the Fed), but was forced to purchase it anyway. Of course it’s a disaster. He bought it on a whim and has no idea how to run a social media company.
    - baxtr 4y ago
      Same could be said easily about Trump…
      - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
        The difference between Elon and Trump is that when Trump gets in trouble it’s for something reprehensible that his supporters like. When Elon gets in trouble it’s for something that nobody supports (like calling that guy a pedo), and his supporters just sort of feel bad about.
    - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
      His approach to refactoring Twitter, I mean in terms of org structure, culture, and the code itself... is frankly giving me a zero engineering intuition impression. Also he didn't design the SpaceX rocket. He had a hand in the first prototype, which crash and burned. Literally. That's his contribution in terms of engineering. His overall contribution is PR and attracting capital. That's really it. I'd say sits closer to a politician.
  - pavel_lishin 4y ago
    I think Musk is a celebrity, not a politician or an engineer or an entrepreneur. Politicians have to answer to their constituents, engineers have to answer to the laws of physics, and entrepreneurs have to answer to the laws of economics. Celebrities are beholden to nothing but marketing, and until recently, Musk (or someone on his team) has been doing a pretty good job of selling his image.
- mtzet 4y ago
  As someone who knows nothing at all about the success of PayPal, can you elaborate on why? I'm also curious about his role in the success of Tesla and SpaceX. I personally find those to be two of the most interesting startups in a long while, and have been inclined to think that Musk being involved in both to be unlikely to be a coincidence.
  - bostik 4y ago
    At least in the book, PayPal Wars, there is a notion that Musk effectively bought his way in to PayPal. He was running a competing payment service, named "X" or something like that. PayPal had better mindshare and tight eBay integration. Competition was intense. So the two companies merged, and focused on just one brand: PayPal's. Reading between the lines, it wasn't an easy marriage.
    - tim333 4y ago
      The Book Founders at Work's first chapter is about Max Levchin at PayPal. One paragraph >We had this merger with a company called X.com. It was a bit of a tough merger because the companies were really competitive — we were two large competitors in the same market. For a while, Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com [Musk] became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it's at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix. And eventually to stop Musk breaking the thing by rewriting it for windows at a time they were very busy fighting fraud on the network, Peter Thiel kicked him out as CEO. >...I was like,"You gotta go,man."My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
HopenHeyHi 4y ago
This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168 Heh. Y'all are hilarious. 6 months in and countless predictions of imminent doom, site will collapse, everybody will leave for Mastodon, its all going to shit.. Meanwhile dude changes the logo to Doge and the building sign to Titter. I think you're taking a silly website way too seriously. The amount of angst and bile and vitriol and hystrionics directed at Musk all while accusing him of losing his mind is just remarkable. Edit: Elon silencing substack bad. Shut up HopenHeyHi! Take a look in the mirror guys. Note that I am not commenting on his behavior or defending him, I am commenting on yours.
- maxbond 4y ago
  This is the moral equivalent of telling people to stop hitting themselves. Musk starts damaging something people care for very much (people found friendship and community on Twitter and it became a big part of their lives), they get upset about it, and the fact that they are emotionally invested is presented as evidence they are unserious and their views can be dismissed. Even outright mocked. If they don't immediately abandon the platform (because they want to stay connected to that community) that's presented as evidence their views are shrill whinging, that they actually consent to their mistreatment, and can again be dismissed and derided. This is just a rhetorical device to deflect criticism.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    It's the behavior and rationale of people opposing Musk that's being mocked. People are running around framing every single issue as if it's the end of the world for their experience, and downvoting any and everything they can, except comments which indulge similar histrionics. I mean this change is something I personally oppose, but the people whinging about it would generally be cheering it on rapturously had it been done under 'Old Twitter' leadership. In other words, the criticisms are not being made in good faith.
    - deleted 4y ago
atoav 4y ago
I remember being on a hacker camp ca. 2016 and arguing the position that he is not the genius as which he was presented, because some of the stuff he said made no sense at all and ao I checked a little deeper and there was more of that. Back then he still had many convinced. Or at least they accepted thst the guy was supporting the cool companies. That was 7 years ago. Nowadays that guy is a joke in the same circles because it has become glowingly obvious just how much of his persona was a lie. The one thing I can give him credit for is that he knew which companies to bet on... and apparently the damage he could do was limited by others there. Now that he is in full control his style of doing things is out there in the daylight. And quite frankly: I don't even know why it is out in the daylight — Elon could have done the smart thing and let the company do it's thing and give them goals that they should find a route to in the next years. But Elon being Elon he just had to make it about himself and micromanage Twitter into chaos. So if you have run out of mental energy to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, that is a bit late, but hey, better late then never.
Freedom2 4y ago
Controversial take: I believe that Twitter has significantly improved as a platform, with extended tweet lengths, enhanced media quality, a consistent reverse chronological timeline, reduced advertisements, broader access to verification, and initial steps towards algorithm transparency. The issue lies with the users, as the overwhelming criticism of Elon tends to eclipse any reasonable discourse about the platform. In my opinion, Twitter had reached a plateau and required some revitalization. As time goes on, we can expect further enhancements to emerge.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  One recurring trend in Musk's successes has been mockery. When SpaceX was still a tiny upstart, their ideas of reusable rockets were actively mocked by "experts" in the industry, which proclaimed they'd already long since researched such ideas, and they simply weren't economically viable. And similarly with Tesla. It's claimed he didn't start Tesla, which is technically true but misleading. He joined when it was 4 guys with some big ideas, but the "real" founders of the company would "leave" before Tesla's first product, The Roadster, hit production. Beyond that, electric cars were largely seen as a "radical" (as in dubious) idea at the time, with the status quo being hybrids which tended to look weird and be poor performing, more serving as a means of virtue signaling environmentalism than anything else. Basically, it all gets back to Henry Ford. If you ask people what they want, they'd have said faster horses. When an innovator takes over a company, his ideas are going to look dumb to most people, which is why most people are not innovators. All that said, censoring Substack looks dumb.
  - sshine 4y ago
    > censoring Substack looks dumb This is not the first or the last time a media company / social network is censoring links to its competitors. It’s not to the benefit of the users. It may look like it breaks with the spirit of twitter. Ultimately and sadly, making a worse service when a competitor stands to benefit more from an organic cooperation via link sharing may be the strategic choice. Blame silo strategies.
- maxerickson 4y ago

by extr 4y ago

hinkley 4y ago

I had a coworker who would have anger lines come out of his skull if you said Musk had anything to do with PayPal success. It was like Barney Stinson talking about Ralph Macchio. Then Tesla and SpaceX happened and I was like, “hmm, maybe he was wrong” and then Twitter happened and I’m thinking, “no, I get it now”.

NhanH 4y ago
Recently, I have a theory that Musk is a politician, not an entrepreneur. It just so happened that he wasn't born in the US to formally pursuit the politician career (yes, I know that President is nominally the only office limited to US-born citizen. That isn't the point, it's still vastly harder to be a high ranking politician without being born in the country) From that viewpoint, it makes sense as to how he could be successful in some venture and not so in others. The hypothesis would mean that he's very good at organizing, dealing with bureaucracy, doing PR etc. Not so much at actually building things, designing, engineering, or basically building consumer business.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  I have the opposite view. Musk is a fantastic engineer, but a terrible politician. He’s the kind of man who starts a rocket company and knows exactly how everything on the rocket works, but then impulsively smokes a joint on a podcast and risks his security clearance and defense funding to said rocket company. Musk has no political sense whatsoever, he’s far too impulsive. But the impulsiveness does make headlines which people mistake as media savvy. That’s how he got himself into this mess in the first place. Musk impulsively decided to offer to buy Twitter with no due diligence, then sensibly tried to back out when he came to his senses (helped a bit by the Fed), but was forced to purchase it anyway. Of course it’s a disaster. He bought it on a whim and has no idea how to run a social media company.
  - baxtr 4y ago
    Same could be said easily about Trump…
    - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
      The difference between Elon and Trump is that when Trump gets in trouble it’s for something reprehensible that his supporters like. When Elon gets in trouble it’s for something that nobody supports (like calling that guy a pedo), and his supporters just sort of feel bad about.
  - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
    His approach to refactoring Twitter, I mean in terms of org structure, culture, and the code itself... is frankly giving me a zero engineering intuition impression. Also he didn't design the SpaceX rocket. He had a hand in the first prototype, which crash and burned. Literally. That's his contribution in terms of engineering. His overall contribution is PR and attracting capital. That's really it. I'd say sits closer to a politician.
- pavel_lishin 4y ago
  I think Musk is a celebrity, not a politician or an engineer or an entrepreneur. Politicians have to answer to their constituents, engineers have to answer to the laws of physics, and entrepreneurs have to answer to the laws of economics. Celebrities are beholden to nothing but marketing, and until recently, Musk (or someone on his team) has been doing a pretty good job of selling his image.
mtzet 4y ago
As someone who knows nothing at all about the success of PayPal, can you elaborate on why? I'm also curious about his role in the success of Tesla and SpaceX. I personally find those to be two of the most interesting startups in a long while, and have been inclined to think that Musk being involved in both to be unlikely to be a coincidence.
- bostik 4y ago
  At least in the book, PayPal Wars, there is a notion that Musk effectively bought his way in to PayPal. He was running a competing payment service, named "X" or something like that. PayPal had better mindshare and tight eBay integration. Competition was intense. So the two companies merged, and focused on just one brand: PayPal's. Reading between the lines, it wasn't an easy marriage.
  - tim333 4y ago
    The Book Founders at Work's first chapter is about Max Levchin at PayPal. One paragraph >We had this merger with a company called X.com. It was a bit of a tough merger because the companies were really competitive — we were two large competitors in the same market. For a while, Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com [Musk] became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it's at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix. And eventually to stop Musk breaking the thing by rewriting it for windows at a time they were very busy fighting fraud on the network, Peter Thiel kicked him out as CEO. >...I was like,"You gotta go,man."My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

HopenHeyHi 4y ago

This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168 Heh. Y'all are hilarious. 6 months in and countless predictions of imminent doom, site will collapse, everybody will leave for Mastodon, its all going to shit.. Meanwhile dude changes the logo to Doge and the building sign to Titter. I think you're taking a silly website way too seriously. The amount of angst and bile and vitriol and hystrionics directed at Musk all while accusing him of losing his mind is just remarkable. Edit: Elon silencing substack bad. Shut up HopenHeyHi! Take a look in the mirror guys. Note that I am not commenting on his behavior or defending him, I am commenting on yours.

maxbond 4y ago
This is the moral equivalent of telling people to stop hitting themselves. Musk starts damaging something people care for very much (people found friendship and community on Twitter and it became a big part of their lives), they get upset about it, and the fact that they are emotionally invested is presented as evidence they are unserious and their views can be dismissed. Even outright mocked. If they don't immediately abandon the platform (because they want to stay connected to that community) that's presented as evidence their views are shrill whinging, that they actually consent to their mistreatment, and can again be dismissed and derided. This is just a rhetorical device to deflect criticism.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  It's the behavior and rationale of people opposing Musk that's being mocked. People are running around framing every single issue as if it's the end of the world for their experience, and downvoting any and everything they can, except comments which indulge similar histrionics. I mean this change is something I personally oppose, but the people whinging about it would generally be cheering it on rapturously had it been done under 'Old Twitter' leadership. In other words, the criticisms are not being made in good faith.
  - deleted 4y ago

atoav 4y ago

I remember being on a hacker camp ca. 2016 and arguing the position that he is not the genius as which he was presented, because some of the stuff he said made no sense at all and ao I checked a little deeper and there was more of that. Back then he still had many convinced. Or at least they accepted thst the guy was supporting the cool companies. That was 7 years ago. Nowadays that guy is a joke in the same circles because it has become glowingly obvious just how much of his persona was a lie. The one thing I can give him credit for is that he knew which companies to bet on... and apparently the damage he could do was limited by others there. Now that he is in full control his style of doing things is out there in the daylight. And quite frankly: I don't even know why it is out in the daylight — Elon could have done the smart thing and let the company do it's thing and give them goals that they should find a route to in the next years. But Elon being Elon he just had to make it about himself and micromanage Twitter into chaos. So if you have run out of mental energy to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, that is a bit late, but hey, better late then never.

Freedom2 4y ago

Controversial take: I believe that Twitter has significantly improved as a platform, with extended tweet lengths, enhanced media quality, a consistent reverse chronological timeline, reduced advertisements, broader access to verification, and initial steps towards algorithm transparency. The issue lies with the users, as the overwhelming criticism of Elon tends to eclipse any reasonable discourse about the platform. In my opinion, Twitter had reached a plateau and required some revitalization. As time goes on, we can expect further enhancements to emerge.

somenameforme 4y ago
One recurring trend in Musk's successes has been mockery. When SpaceX was still a tiny upstart, their ideas of reusable rockets were actively mocked by "experts" in the industry, which proclaimed they'd already long since researched such ideas, and they simply weren't economically viable. And similarly with Tesla. It's claimed he didn't start Tesla, which is technically true but misleading. He joined when it was 4 guys with some big ideas, but the "real" founders of the company would "leave" before Tesla's first product, The Roadster, hit production. Beyond that, electric cars were largely seen as a "radical" (as in dubious) idea at the time, with the status quo being hybrids which tended to look weird and be poor performing, more serving as a means of virtue signaling environmentalism than anything else. Basically, it all gets back to Henry Ford. If you ask people what they want, they'd have said faster horses. When an innovator takes over a company, his ideas are going to look dumb to most people, which is why most people are not innovators. All that said, censoring Substack looks dumb.
- sshine 4y ago
  > censoring Substack looks dumb This is not the first or the last time a media company / social network is censoring links to its competitors. It’s not to the benefit of the users. It may look like it breaks with the spirit of twitter. Ultimately and sadly, making a worse service when a competitor stands to benefit more from an organic cooperation via link sharing may be the strategic choice. Blame silo strategies.
maxerickson 4y ago