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This is very well written and made me laugh. When you're objective about it, it's all accurate, and pretty shocking. What's shocking to me is that Elon could be

by awill 3y ago

This is very well written and made me laugh. When you're objective about it, it's all accurate, and pretty shocking. What's shocking to me is that Elon could be so successful at Tesla, and fail so spectacularly at Twitter. Of course the skills are different, but the general skillset of being a COE and not making stupid business decisions should be universal. Also, he claimed Twitter was losing millions per day and that's why he had to fire everyone, when in reality, the millions per day in loses were interest on the loan he'd used to buy Twitter. So he created the problem, and then blamed that. Pretty shocking.

alexose 3y ago
I wonder if part of his "effectiveness" is that he seems so willing to burn everything down. As long as he preserves this image, he can maintain a level of control that other CEOs can't. Kind of the CEO version of the Madman Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory
dylan604 3y ago
Isn't it in the news now or very very recently that Tesla isn't really run by Musk as much as people might think?
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Reportedly the leadership of SpaceX manages him like he's a medieval boy king. They spend a lot of time figuring out how to get him to come to the right conclusions and making him feel like he's in charge. I would bet that Tesla does the same thing. Twitter didn't have this management layer, and we have now seen the result.
  - a1pulley 3y ago
    > Reportedly the leadership of SpaceX manages him like he's a medieval boy king A family friend who works closely with Elon at SpaceX puts it like, "you have to make him believe that your technical conclusions and recommendations are actually his to have any hope of traction." Otherwise, even if you're proven right years later when Elon's strategy fails, he will hold you to task for, "not convincing him hard enough."
spaceman_2020 3y ago
Has he really failed at Twitter? Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. Their business metrics were absolute crap for a business of their scale and in the pandemic environment. The jury is still out if new Twitter has failed or not.
- 542458 3y ago
  > Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. What metrics are you looking at? Pre-Musk Twitter didn't seem that badly run - it was profitable outside of a one-time court judgment.
  - spaceman_2020 3y ago
    Their margin was 1% during the pandemic in 2020. If your mature social media site that’s been around for over a decade and has hundreds of millions of users has a 1% margin and effectively lost money in 2020, you’re not a well-run organization. To give you an idea of their incompetence, when you create a Twitter Ads account, you’re asked to choose your time zone. I’m in UTC+5:30. Except you can’t choose half hour increments, so I was forced to choose UTC+5:00. All the data and reports had the time error. My time zone is home to over 1.4 billion people. If your billion dollar corporation that depends on ads can’t even be bothered to fix the time zone selection for 1/6th of the world’s population in its flagship product, its not a well-run business.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Before his purchase, twitter was a company that had hope of profitability as a regular occurrence, if they could adjust some spend on infrastructure and engineering. That's a lot harder to do with a giant debt crushing your soul, by a guy who can't really put any extra money into it to give it runway. All of the changes Elon has made to twitter have been desperate attempts to get some cash to stay alive, because the company is in a desperate position. At one point, they were down something like 50% in ad spend. Not many places can survive with new billions in debt and half the revenue. I don't know if he has been able to convince advertisers to come back, but they are fickle, stupid, and have no memory so surely that's a possibility, and this new CEO might be an attempt to convince advertisers his hands are off the wheel.
dale_glass 3y ago
I think the answer is pretty obvious: the skills are wildly different, and Musk obviously didn't even understand what he's supposed to be doing at Twitter. Tesla is relatively simple: you've got to make cool cars. They have to work and people have to want to buy them. SpaceX is relatively simple: you've got to make rockets. They have to work, and be cheaper than the competition. With Twitter it seems he doesn't understand that there's nothing to build really. The software's already there. Twitter's main job is purely social, trying to please a whole bunch of governments and advertising agencies, as well as understanding why people post there and how to make them post more. There's no straightforward technical test to it, it's a delicate social balancing problem, and one awfully ill-suited to Musk's typical "move fast and break things" approach.

by awill 3y ago

alexose 3y ago

I wonder if part of his "effectiveness" is that he seems so willing to burn everything down. As long as he preserves this image, he can maintain a level of control that other CEOs can't. Kind of the CEO version of the Madman Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory

dylan604 3y ago

Isn't it in the news now or very very recently that Tesla isn't really run by Musk as much as people might think?

pclmulqdq 3y ago
Reportedly the leadership of SpaceX manages him like he's a medieval boy king. They spend a lot of time figuring out how to get him to come to the right conclusions and making him feel like he's in charge. I would bet that Tesla does the same thing. Twitter didn't have this management layer, and we have now seen the result.
- a1pulley 3y ago
  > Reportedly the leadership of SpaceX manages him like he's a medieval boy king A family friend who works closely with Elon at SpaceX puts it like, "you have to make him believe that your technical conclusions and recommendations are actually his to have any hope of traction." Otherwise, even if you're proven right years later when Elon's strategy fails, he will hold you to task for, "not convincing him hard enough."

spaceman_2020 3y ago

Has he really failed at Twitter? Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. Their business metrics were absolute crap for a business of their scale and in the pandemic environment. The jury is still out if new Twitter has failed or not.

542458 3y ago
> Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. What metrics are you looking at? Pre-Musk Twitter didn't seem that badly run - it was profitable outside of a one-time court judgment.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Their margin was 1% during the pandemic in 2020. If your mature social media site that’s been around for over a decade and has hundreds of millions of users has a 1% margin and effectively lost money in 2020, you’re not a well-run organization. To give you an idea of their incompetence, when you create a Twitter Ads account, you’re asked to choose your time zone. I’m in UTC+5:30. Except you can’t choose half hour increments, so I was forced to choose UTC+5:00. All the data and reports had the time error. My time zone is home to over 1.4 billion people. If your billion dollar corporation that depends on ads can’t even be bothered to fix the time zone selection for 1/6th of the world’s population in its flagship product, its not a well-run business.
mrguyorama 3y ago
Before his purchase, twitter was a company that had hope of profitability as a regular occurrence, if they could adjust some spend on infrastructure and engineering. That's a lot harder to do with a giant debt crushing your soul, by a guy who can't really put any extra money into it to give it runway. All of the changes Elon has made to twitter have been desperate attempts to get some cash to stay alive, because the company is in a desperate position. At one point, they were down something like 50% in ad spend. Not many places can survive with new billions in debt and half the revenue. I don't know if he has been able to convince advertisers to come back, but they are fickle, stupid, and have no memory so surely that's a possibility, and this new CEO might be an attempt to convince advertisers his hands are off the wheel.

dale_glass 3y ago

I think the answer is pretty obvious: the skills are wildly different, and Musk obviously didn't even understand what he's supposed to be doing at Twitter. Tesla is relatively simple: you've got to make cool cars. They have to work and people have to want to buy them. SpaceX is relatively simple: you've got to make rockets. They have to work, and be cheaper than the competition. With Twitter it seems he doesn't understand that there's nothing to build really. The software's already there. Twitter's main job is purely social, trying to please a whole bunch of governments and advertising agencies, as well as understanding why people post there and how to make them post more. There's no straightforward technical test to it, it's a delicate social balancing problem, and one awfully ill-suited to Musk's typical "move fast and break things" approach.