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With all this, I'm 100% convinced that SpaceX and Tesla work despite musk and not because of him. Twitter isn't that lucky.

wil421 4y ago
I wonder if his over companies had a collective sigh of relief when he bought twitter knowing his attention would be on his new toy.
samwillis 4y ago
SpaceX and Tesla are both the type of company that needed a lot of money and a leader who has a "crazy" vision and is single minded about it. That is what Elon is (rich, "crazy" and single minded), thats why they were successful. They wouldn't have happened without that. Twitter didn't need either money or a crazy single minded leader... (Edit: this isn't meant to be taken as a compliment of his management style!)
- andrekandre 4y ago
  if true, i wonder, does spacex and tesla still need such a leader nowadays?
  - samwillis 4y ago
    No, certainly not Tesla, and I think the over investment in self driving cars is a result of him not stepping back soon enough. SpaceX is run incredible well by Gwynne Shotwell, she is responsible for the success of the Falcon launch business and Starlink. Without Elons mad visions and relentless need to keep moving Starship would not be happening, so maybe he is still important for that.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- frognumber 4y ago
  This is true. Elon swings wildly in the public image from genius to idiot and from superhero to supervillain. Very few opinions otherwise. Polarized as anything else.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Musk is doing his best to polarize people against him all on his own. His public image is a direct result of his actions. Stuff like blazing a blunt in a podcast was legit funny, him calling a rescue diver a pedo was fucked up, but nowadays he's showing open disdain for democracy and its freedoms - he's making a clownshow out of "freedom of speech" (just try tweeting a substack link), openly shitting on the freedom of press (by not having media teams at all, banning critical media like Tesla did in Germany a few months ago, or by firing Twitter's PR team and replacing it by a poo-emoji autoreply) and personally had a bunch of high-profile fascists unblocked while antifascist accounts got the boot on the suggestion of people like "Catturd" or Andy Ngo. Not to mention his various run-ins with the law such as him ignoring direct SEC orders (the one where he was supposed to have someone else sign-off on tweets with stock market impact) or the shady stuff surrounding the German Tesla factory. He could have stayed in the public image selling expensive cars with weirdly sexual naming schemes (S-3-X-Y) and shooting rockets into orbit... but no, that amount of attention wasn't enough for him. It's all a direct result of his own actions.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  [flagged]
- SonOfKyuss 4y ago
  Good points. I also wouldn’t characterize his actions at Twitter thus far as being “single minded.” Twitter is personal to him, and he can’t keep his ego from getting in the way of making rational business decisions.
- Ambolia 4y ago
  Twitter needed constant input from government money to run disinfo campaigns. Dropping $44 billion on it and using it to antagonize the main client that kept the whole company afloat was a bad idea. Now Elon is panicking because those $44 billions were dropped on a hole. Hopefully a bunch of fragmented forums replace Twitter rather than one big site.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
matthewdgreen 4y ago
Eventually he’ll get tired of losing money and hand over the reins and/or go bankrupt. Then someone smarter than him will move Twitter back towards its previous strategy, which was not perfect but at least made it a stable and workable place to have conversations. Then he can go back to Tesla and force them to build something even dumber than the Cybertruck.
- badloginagain 4y ago
  But they haven't built any cybertrucks
  - Avshalom 4y ago
    that doesn't mean he can't force them to build something dumber.
- y0ssar1an 4y ago
  Cybertruck looks like it will be a great off-road truck and it took lots of manufacturing innovation to make it so cheap.
schiffern 4y ago
>SpaceX and Tesla work despite musk and not because of him Statistically it's pretty much impossible for this to be true. You're claiming that Elon effectively hit the business lottery twice, despite his success being less likely than average vs other leaders.
- DamonHD 4y ago
  Adding a large inheritance to your hand skews the odds somewhat... Also, odds are not all of destiny. Some crappy things keep winning despite those odds. [Edit: thanks for informative and interesting replies!]
  - schiffern 4y ago
    >a large inheritance "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes." This lie is very trendy, but YSK that Elon Musk did not receive a large inheritance. Until the age of 16 he was raised middle class supported by an Engineer salary, and then years later his father invested (ie not an "inheritance") $28k out of a $200k Zip2 round. If that size of 'large inheritance' really made such an enormous difference, then 50% of HN would be billionaires by now! Clearly there must be more going on in Elon's case.
    - DamonHD 4y ago
      Thanks for the numbers.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    While it's definitely going to skew the odds, and by a lot, the sparsity of similar successful startups in those areas before him suggests that neither SpaceX nor Telsa were the kind of things that you can build with what he had from combined inheritance and PayPal cash-out. That said, I don't think there was much from those mines: https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-mine/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
    - 4y ago
CPLX 4y ago
I think people underestimate the degree to which people change with age, generally, and the really specific ways that people with WAY too much money and power change. He’s different person now. He’s always been fundamentally a bullshit artist but there were forces keeping that in check. That mattered.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  so which way are you predicting he is going to go? personally, i cannot see him getting MORE demented. oh well, perhaps i can. in 20 years time, i look forward to see a remake of citizen kane featuring musk. trouble is, no obvious orson welles on the horizon.
fluidcruft 4y ago
Perhaps the presence of Musk keeps protects the despite-Musk people at SpaceX and Tesla. I generally am not a huge fan of middle management so I can respect the terror. I've never really paid much attention to him, frankly. I was aware of SpaceX and Tesla. I was impressed watching the SpaceX launch over the pandemic. But I'm going to be quite clear about one thing: I had been considering a Tesla after recently moving to a place that has a lot of them and that also has a lot of charging infrastructure. But after seeing Musk's management of Twitter and finding out some of the things going on a Tesla regarding safety that sound like they are similar to Musk's management of Twitter, I will never, ever buy a Tesla or anything I find out Musk is involved with. That's just how it is. I don't see him or his stupid Twitter antics providing any value to me whatsoever.
jeroenhd 4y ago
There are stories about how SpaceX and Tesla have a team of people working around the clock to manage Elon. They supposedly like the money and the image he brings to companies, but need to protect the companies from his influence. This would involve placing people in the office to act like he wants them to, instructing people to react in certain ways, and convincing him that he came up with the ideas these companies end up implementing. At first I thought this was just a silly internet meme hating on Musk, but now that he reigns over Twitter without a Musk-management team in place, I'm starting to think there may be some truth to that.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  There are stories about short sellers having teams who constantly post on social media and message boards negative stories about Elon Musk in hopes that it will make their investments in undermining the companies associated with him pay off. But hey, it must be true, as all stories about controversial people are when it reinforces one's need to see that person in a certain light for bias confirmation.
  - moneywoes 4y ago
    See any links?
  - kelipso 4y ago
    There is no possible way to verify the story unless they come out and admit it and publish reams of evidence along with it. So it's always going to be given that this fact is true, then that story is more likely to be true. Or given that this one thing is more likely to be true, then that story is more likely to be true. Saying something is true/false based on news stories is really silly since you can almost never verify the truth of that story. Always going to be more/less likely given this/that.
- schiffern 4y ago
  >They supposedly like the money and the image he brings to companies, but need to protect the companies from his influence. This "explanation" doesn't pass the smell test, because the chronology of cause-and-effect is inconsistent. Elon's companies get successful, which makes him famous... which explains how his companies were successful before he got famous?
nvln 4y ago
Over the past couple of months, I have developed a slightly generous take on twitter and Elon: - Being forced into buying twitter has pushed the company / him into absolute survival mode - Instinctive paranoia kicks in when you are in that mode to keep you on your toes - When you have seen outsized success and have a sycophant army, but no deep friendship, the paranoia brings in a me against the world mindset - All the people you alienate as a result of your paranoid action gang up, further affirming your paranoia. - The vicious cycle continues This lens explains most of his actions and has softened my view of Elon as a CEO trying his very best to keep the company afloat.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Paranoia or not, there is absolutely no justification for amplifying people like Kanye "I see good things about Hitler" West.
  - nvln 4y ago
    Absolutely not. It's just a lens that I found recently and thought it was interesting enough to share in this context. Not trying to justify or soften the actions or consequences.
- detourdog 4y ago
  I have always thought he considered twitter as UI for Starlink. Once the network is pervasive subscribe to twitter and your on the Starlink network and all it services. The way the purchase happened I think looks like one realized the timing wasn't right for the V2 satellites and tried to manage the cashflow.
  - nvln 4y ago
    That's a super interesting take.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  Some would say slightly naive take, really. - He wasn't forced into buying Twitter. He said he would, signed a contract that said he would, collected the money and said he would, then when attempting to back down while lying about just as well as a middle schooler justifying why he hasn't done his homework, was made to hold to his contract. - He put himself in that situation. - His sycophant army is his own doing. He has never, ever tolerated dissent, neither in his companies or in public. See: calling people pedophiles when told a sub is a shit idea, or his behavior known throughout Tesla, SpaceX and others. When the only way to stay in his companies is to be a yes man, don't be surprised when all you have are bootlickers. - It's not as a result of paranoid action, it's as a result of Musk being a downright cunt. This lens fails to see that Musk is doing so for a single reason: for the first time in his life of a billionaire, he's being held accountable and can't weasel his way out of trouble or into a cofounder position. Ain't life a bitch.

wil421 4y ago

I wonder if his over companies had a collective sigh of relief when he bought twitter knowing his attention would be on his new toy.

samwillis 4y ago

SpaceX and Tesla are both the type of company that needed a lot of money and a leader who has a "crazy" vision and is single minded about it. That is what Elon is (rich, "crazy" and single minded), thats why they were successful. They wouldn't have happened without that. Twitter didn't need either money or a crazy single minded leader... (Edit: this isn't meant to be taken as a compliment of his management style!)

andrekandre 4y ago
if true, i wonder, does spacex and tesla still need such a leader nowadays?
- samwillis 4y ago
  No, certainly not Tesla, and I think the over investment in self driving cars is a result of him not stepping back soon enough. SpaceX is run incredible well by Gwynne Shotwell, she is responsible for the success of the Falcon launch business and Starlink. Without Elons mad visions and relentless need to keep moving Starship would not be happening, so maybe he is still important for that.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
frognumber 4y ago
This is true. Elon swings wildly in the public image from genius to idiot and from superhero to supervillain. Very few opinions otherwise. Polarized as anything else.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Musk is doing his best to polarize people against him all on his own. His public image is a direct result of his actions. Stuff like blazing a blunt in a podcast was legit funny, him calling a rescue diver a pedo was fucked up, but nowadays he's showing open disdain for democracy and its freedoms - he's making a clownshow out of "freedom of speech" (just try tweeting a substack link), openly shitting on the freedom of press (by not having media teams at all, banning critical media like Tesla did in Germany a few months ago, or by firing Twitter's PR team and replacing it by a poo-emoji autoreply) and personally had a bunch of high-profile fascists unblocked while antifascist accounts got the boot on the suggestion of people like "Catturd" or Andy Ngo. Not to mention his various run-ins with the law such as him ignoring direct SEC orders (the one where he was supposed to have someone else sign-off on tweets with stock market impact) or the shady stuff surrounding the German Tesla factory. He could have stayed in the public image selling expensive cars with weirdly sexual naming schemes (S-3-X-Y) and shooting rockets into orbit... but no, that amount of attention wasn't enough for him. It's all a direct result of his own actions.
drexlspivey 4y ago
[flagged]
SonOfKyuss 4y ago
Good points. I also wouldn’t characterize his actions at Twitter thus far as being “single minded.” Twitter is personal to him, and he can’t keep his ego from getting in the way of making rational business decisions.
Ambolia 4y ago
Twitter needed constant input from government money to run disinfo campaigns. Dropping $44 billion on it and using it to antagonize the main client that kept the whole company afloat was a bad idea. Now Elon is panicking because those $44 billions were dropped on a hole. Hopefully a bunch of fragmented forums replace Twitter rather than one big site.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

matthewdgreen 4y ago

Eventually he’ll get tired of losing money and hand over the reins and/or go bankrupt. Then someone smarter than him will move Twitter back towards its previous strategy, which was not perfect but at least made it a stable and workable place to have conversations. Then he can go back to Tesla and force them to build something even dumber than the Cybertruck.

badloginagain 4y ago
But they haven't built any cybertrucks
- Avshalom 4y ago
  that doesn't mean he can't force them to build something dumber.
y0ssar1an 4y ago
Cybertruck looks like it will be a great off-road truck and it took lots of manufacturing innovation to make it so cheap.

schiffern 4y ago

>SpaceX and Tesla work despite musk and not because of him Statistically it's pretty much impossible for this to be true. You're claiming that Elon effectively hit the business lottery twice, despite his success being less likely than average vs other leaders.

DamonHD 4y ago
Adding a large inheritance to your hand skews the odds somewhat... Also, odds are not all of destiny. Some crappy things keep winning despite those odds. [Edit: thanks for informative and interesting replies!]
- schiffern 4y ago
  >a large inheritance "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes." This lie is very trendy, but YSK that Elon Musk did not receive a large inheritance. Until the age of 16 he was raised middle class supported by an Engineer salary, and then years later his father invested (ie not an "inheritance") $28k out of a $200k Zip2 round. If that size of 'large inheritance' really made such an enormous difference, then 50% of HN would be billionaires by now! Clearly there must be more going on in Elon's case.
  - DamonHD 4y ago
    Thanks for the numbers.
- ben_w 4y ago
  While it's definitely going to skew the odds, and by a lot, the sparsity of similar successful startups in those areas before him suggests that neither SpaceX nor Telsa were the kind of things that you can build with what he had from combined inheritance and PayPal cash-out. That said, I don't think there was much from those mines: https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-mine/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
  - 4y ago

CPLX 4y ago

I think people underestimate the degree to which people change with age, generally, and the really specific ways that people with WAY too much money and power change. He’s different person now. He’s always been fundamentally a bullshit artist but there were forces keeping that in check. That mattered.

zabzonk 4y ago
so which way are you predicting he is going to go? personally, i cannot see him getting MORE demented. oh well, perhaps i can. in 20 years time, i look forward to see a remake of citizen kane featuring musk. trouble is, no obvious orson welles on the horizon.

fluidcruft 4y ago

Perhaps the presence of Musk keeps protects the despite-Musk people at SpaceX and Tesla. I generally am not a huge fan of middle management so I can respect the terror. I've never really paid much attention to him, frankly. I was aware of SpaceX and Tesla. I was impressed watching the SpaceX launch over the pandemic. But I'm going to be quite clear about one thing: I had been considering a Tesla after recently moving to a place that has a lot of them and that also has a lot of charging infrastructure. But after seeing Musk's management of Twitter and finding out some of the things going on a Tesla regarding safety that sound like they are similar to Musk's management of Twitter, I will never, ever buy a Tesla or anything I find out Musk is involved with. That's just how it is. I don't see him or his stupid Twitter antics providing any value to me whatsoever.

jeroenhd 4y ago

There are stories about how SpaceX and Tesla have a team of people working around the clock to manage Elon. They supposedly like the money and the image he brings to companies, but need to protect the companies from his influence. This would involve placing people in the office to act like he wants them to, instructing people to react in certain ways, and convincing him that he came up with the ideas these companies end up implementing. At first I thought this was just a silly internet meme hating on Musk, but now that he reigns over Twitter without a Musk-management team in place, I'm starting to think there may be some truth to that.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
There are stories about short sellers having teams who constantly post on social media and message boards negative stories about Elon Musk in hopes that it will make their investments in undermining the companies associated with him pay off. But hey, it must be true, as all stories about controversial people are when it reinforces one's need to see that person in a certain light for bias confirmation.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  See any links?
- kelipso 4y ago
  There is no possible way to verify the story unless they come out and admit it and publish reams of evidence along with it. So it's always going to be given that this fact is true, then that story is more likely to be true. Or given that this one thing is more likely to be true, then that story is more likely to be true. Saying something is true/false based on news stories is really silly since you can almost never verify the truth of that story. Always going to be more/less likely given this/that.
schiffern 4y ago
>They supposedly like the money and the image he brings to companies, but need to protect the companies from his influence. This "explanation" doesn't pass the smell test, because the chronology of cause-and-effect is inconsistent. Elon's companies get successful, which makes him famous... which explains how his companies were successful before he got famous?

nvln 4y ago

Over the past couple of months, I have developed a slightly generous take on twitter and Elon: - Being forced into buying twitter has pushed the company / him into absolute survival mode - Instinctive paranoia kicks in when you are in that mode to keep you on your toes - When you have seen outsized success and have a sycophant army, but no deep friendship, the paranoia brings in a me against the world mindset - All the people you alienate as a result of your paranoid action gang up, further affirming your paranoia. - The vicious cycle continues This lens explains most of his actions and has softened my view of Elon as a CEO trying his very best to keep the company afloat.

mschuster91 4y ago
Paranoia or not, there is absolutely no justification for amplifying people like Kanye "I see good things about Hitler" West.
- nvln 4y ago
  Absolutely not. It's just a lens that I found recently and thought it was interesting enough to share in this context. Not trying to justify or soften the actions or consequences.
detourdog 4y ago
I have always thought he considered twitter as UI for Starlink. Once the network is pervasive subscribe to twitter and your on the Starlink network and all it services. The way the purchase happened I think looks like one realized the timing wasn't right for the V2 satellites and tried to manage the cashflow.
- nvln 4y ago
  That's a super interesting take.
ohgodplsno 4y ago
Some would say slightly naive take, really. - He wasn't forced into buying Twitter. He said he would, signed a contract that said he would, collected the money and said he would, then when attempting to back down while lying about just as well as a middle schooler justifying why he hasn't done his homework, was made to hold to his contract. - He put himself in that situation. - His sycophant army is his own doing. He has never, ever tolerated dissent, neither in his companies or in public. See: calling people pedophiles when told a sub is a shit idea, or his behavior known throughout Tesla, SpaceX and others. When the only way to stay in his companies is to be a yes man, don't be surprised when all you have are bootlickers. - It's not as a result of paranoid action, it's as a result of Musk being a downright cunt. This lens fails to see that Musk is doing so for a single reason: for the first time in his life of a billionaire, he's being held accountable and can't weasel his way out of trouble or into a cofounder position. Ain't life a bitch.