9 ms·

I think Elon is a bit misguided, especially in his business ventures in the UK. For instance, it seems egregious to most people that Elon expects people to pay

I think Elon is a bit misguided, especially in his business ventures in the UK. For instance, it seems egregious to most people that Elon expects people to pay £100 a year for a social media site in the midst of a Cost of Living crisis. Personally, I don't see what the hype is around Elon. I think he's done good things, but in other ways he's not a very good businessman.

okeuro49 3y ago
> expects people to pay £100 a year for a social media site in the midst of a Cost of Living crisis. Twitter blue is an optional premium service as far as I know.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Twitter is getting increasingly hard to use without paying for it. Tweet read limits, DM limits, and now the inbox filter for your DMs got silently auto-changed to "only verified accounts can DM you". And no matter how good your reply to someone is quality-wise - a bunch of bluecheck dumbasses will be prioritized. Like every viral tweet has an absurd amount of blue-checked far-right, braindead, scammer and spammer replies below. Musk ruined Twitter by making it "pay to play". If I were to run Twitter, I'd have offered actual verification against a reasonable price to cover the cost of validation, say 100$, years ago. On top of that, some paid features (e.g. long text publishing, uploads > 2 minutes) for those who don't pass the "notability" threshold.
  - tome 3y ago
    > Twitter is getting increasingly hard to use without paying for it nitter.net works wonderfully! > DM limits I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon!
    - eropple 3y ago
      > I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon! Then you should have been happy in like, 2018? when they added that. You could restrict DMs to people you followed for a long time. The only thing Musk did was add, and then force on for users, "only followers and people who have paid me eight bucks a month can DM you". "Thanks Elon", indeed.
      - tome 3y ago
        Ah, I only recalled that there wasn't a way to prevent DMs from everyone, not even people I follow, and indeed Elon's innovation doesn't improve that. Oh well.
      - numpad0 3y ago
        The only thing forced was "only those submit to us AND spammers can DM you". Spam DMs still fills my inbox.
  - cbm-vic-20 3y ago
    I don't have a Twitter account, but I would occasionally read threads, and obviously a lot of content linked to various Twitter posts. After all of these changes to limits and generally making it harder to read Twitter content without being logged in, I simply don't bother clicking on their links anymore. Nothing of value was lost. I'm only one person in a large Internet, and I'm sure they won't miss the $0.03 of advertising revenue I brought them.
- dorkwood 3y ago
  Currently if you try to DM most people, you'll get the message: "Get verified to message this user. Only verified users can send Direct Message requests to people that don’t follow them. Sign up for Twitter Blue to continue." I wouldn't exactly call DMs a premium service.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  But it's what he's relying on to try to arrest the free-fall. He doesn't expect everyone to pay £100/year, but he expects a certain number to do so. IMO, the cost of living crisis was one impediment, but the other, more significant one was the politicisation of it all. If he'd stayed neutral, and offered reliable, useful functionality behind that subscription, I would gladly have paid £5-10/month for the service. As it happens, I will almost certainly never subscribe to Twitter/𝕏 now.
  - badwolf 3y ago
    > try to arrest the free-fall Important to remember that he is the one who pushed the Twitter car over the cliff into financial free-fall with his leveraged buyout.
  - okeuro49 3y ago
    > more significant one was the politicisation of it all. If he'd stayed neutral It's documented that twitter before Musk was working with the US democratic party. Saying certain things that the far-left disagreed with could also result in a ban. However it's easy to see how moving Twitter to the centre, appears to be political move right from the perspective of the Left.
    - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
      Well, I was offering my opinion of why Twitter is failing from a business perspective, not from a moral or political one. You could well argue that the political bias is now open, and that such an outcome is a good thing. But from a business point of view, I maintain that it is bad for the company — overt politicisation is attractive to some, of course, but for a mass-market platform like Twitter/X, alienating approximately half of your potential audience is just bad business.
physicles 3y ago
He did revolutionize the space launch services industry. And jump started the transition to electric cars. Doesn’t seem to know anything about tech though. And he’s burned his reputation to the ground this last year.
- dbingham 3y ago
  Did he do those things? Or did he just slap his name and brand on other people's work in those areas?
  - simonswords82 3y ago
    Of course he did. He put his own money and reputation on the line for both businesses. There's a reason he was lauded before this Twitter/X debacle.
    - AlexandrB 3y ago
      > Of course he did. He put his own money and reputation on the line for both businesses. This describes an investor, not a genius founder/engineer. Also, IIRC his reputation was pretty low key before he got involved in Tesla. Not sure how meaningful "putting his reputation on the line" was at the time. The backlash against Musk was also already growing long before Twitter. Between constantly over-promising and under-delivering regarding Tesla, wacky ideas like the hyper loop, and his social media antics (pedo guy, taking Tesla private for $420) his image was already taking quite a hit.
      - gtirloni 3y ago
        > his social media antics (pedo guy, I didn't know this one and just read more about it. This is so absurd.
      - ulfw 3y ago
        He is an investor and marketer who wants to be a seen as a genius techie, which he clearly isn't. Hence his fake titles such as "Tesla Founder" (he wasn't) or "SpaceX Chief Technology Officer" (he isn't) or "Technoking" (I'm sorry?)
RugnirViking 3y ago
what buisness ventures does he have in the UK? I havent heard about that
mcv 3y ago
> Personally, I don't see what the hype is around Elon. Well I do. Or at least I did. He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla. He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz. He also contributed something to PayPal. I don't know what, and I personally hate PayPal, but some people clearly love it. Up to this point, he came across as a genius serial entrepreneur. I don't know if this was just luck+money, or that he really had some talent that contributed to these successes, but after this, people started lauding him as a real-life Tony Stark, and he apparently started to believe a bit too much in his own genius, and he started to do increasingly stupid things. But there absolutely was a time when the hype seemed absolutely justified.
- ROTMetro 3y ago
  Did Musk originally go to Roscosmos to license their tech and it was only after the laughed him out of the door that SpaceX pursued it's current strategy? His original plan was literally to be dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
- kaba0 3y ago
  I don’t know, is it really fair to attribute any of these to him? There are thousands of engineers/scientists that did the actual work. Hiring them (especially a competent manager who will manage the operations) is just putting money on the table. With a big enough wallet it’s not particularly hard. Also, spacex had plenty of government funds going to it — wouldn’t those same funds going to NASA resulted in similar results from taxpayer money? Afaik only paypal had some kind of actual work done by him personally (and frankly, I hate paypal with a burning passion so that’s not necessary a good thing).
  - jmilloy 3y ago
    The people who did the work deserve credit. So does the person who had the vision and brought them together. Those engineers didn't get together of their own accord and nominate musk as a mascot. Regardless of how you want to summarize Musk's career in the context of his current behavior, which is getting tiresome, I think this is a false dichotomy.
A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
<< Elon expects people to pay £100 a year for a social media site in the midst of a Cost of Living crisis. Honestly, this may be one of the good things he did. The entire population has gotten way too comfortable with free and it would be ideal if we could get away from this model.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  While I agree that the free model is unsustainable, there are better ways than charging £10/mo for one social media site. A lot of people are struggling at the moment.
  - stormfather 3y ago
    What would you suggest? Genuinely curious
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      Much of the Fediverse operates under a “pay what you can” model, and it seems plenty sustainable to me.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        It's not. None of the donation-based instances are in the black, if you factor in the cost of the admins and moderators. Every other month there is a big Mastodon instance going offline because it became too big for its own sake, the admin couldn't handle anymore then shuts it down. Much like any tech company, hardware and operational costs are a small fraction of the total expenses.
        wizzwizz4 3y ago
        > if you factor in the cost of the admins and moderators It is not possible to factor that “cost” in. They're volunteers: they're donating their time, and their time has no market value. Electricity, however, does. > Every other month there is a big Mastodon instance going offline because Every other month there is a big website going offline. A big social group disbanding. This is the normal way of things: human social structures don't endure like friendships do.
_ph_ 3y ago
I wouldn't mind the $8 per month for a platform I use frequently if I get some nice benefits in usage and this enhances the quality of the platform. It is a bit naive to think such a service could be obtained for free. However, beyond the general development Twitter has taken since Musk took over and especially how the premium memberships were rolled out - the conflation of paying for the account with being verified has killed that as an option for me. Nowadays the blue mark rather is an anti-pattern to many. This is what you get when you sell "reputation".

okeuro49 3y ago

> expects people to pay £100 a year for a social media site in the midst of a Cost of Living crisis. Twitter blue is an optional premium service as far as I know.

mschuster91 3y ago
Twitter is getting increasingly hard to use without paying for it. Tweet read limits, DM limits, and now the inbox filter for your DMs got silently auto-changed to "only verified accounts can DM you". And no matter how good your reply to someone is quality-wise - a bunch of bluecheck dumbasses will be prioritized. Like every viral tweet has an absurd amount of blue-checked far-right, braindead, scammer and spammer replies below. Musk ruined Twitter by making it "pay to play". If I were to run Twitter, I'd have offered actual verification against a reasonable price to cover the cost of validation, say 100$, years ago. On top of that, some paid features (e.g. long text publishing, uploads > 2 minutes) for those who don't pass the "notability" threshold.
- tome 3y ago
  > Twitter is getting increasingly hard to use without paying for it nitter.net works wonderfully! > DM limits I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon!
  - eropple 3y ago
    > I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon! Then you should have been happy in like, 2018? when they added that. You could restrict DMs to people you followed for a long time. The only thing Musk did was add, and then force on for users, "only followers and people who have paid me eight bucks a month can DM you". "Thanks Elon", indeed.
    - tome 3y ago
      Ah, I only recalled that there wasn't a way to prevent DMs from everyone, not even people I follow, and indeed Elon's innovation doesn't improve that. Oh well.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      The only thing forced was "only those submit to us AND spammers can DM you". Spam DMs still fills my inbox.
- cbm-vic-20 3y ago
  I don't have a Twitter account, but I would occasionally read threads, and obviously a lot of content linked to various Twitter posts. After all of these changes to limits and generally making it harder to read Twitter content without being logged in, I simply don't bother clicking on their links anymore. Nothing of value was lost. I'm only one person in a large Internet, and I'm sure they won't miss the $0.03 of advertising revenue I brought them.
dorkwood 3y ago
Currently if you try to DM most people, you'll get the message: "Get verified to message this user. Only verified users can send Direct Message requests to people that don’t follow them. Sign up for Twitter Blue to continue." I wouldn't exactly call DMs a premium service.
oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
But it's what he's relying on to try to arrest the free-fall. He doesn't expect everyone to pay £100/year, but he expects a certain number to do so. IMO, the cost of living crisis was one impediment, but the other, more significant one was the politicisation of it all. If he'd stayed neutral, and offered reliable, useful functionality behind that subscription, I would gladly have paid £5-10/month for the service. As it happens, I will almost certainly never subscribe to Twitter/𝕏 now.
- badwolf 3y ago
  > try to arrest the free-fall Important to remember that he is the one who pushed the Twitter car over the cliff into financial free-fall with his leveraged buyout.
- okeuro49 3y ago
  > more significant one was the politicisation of it all. If he'd stayed neutral It's documented that twitter before Musk was working with the US democratic party. Saying certain things that the far-left disagreed with could also result in a ban. However it's easy to see how moving Twitter to the centre, appears to be political move right from the perspective of the Left.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    Well, I was offering my opinion of why Twitter is failing from a business perspective, not from a moral or political one. You could well argue that the political bias is now open, and that such an outcome is a good thing. But from a business point of view, I maintain that it is bad for the company — overt politicisation is attractive to some, of course, but for a mass-market platform like Twitter/X, alienating approximately half of your potential audience is just bad business.

physicles 3y ago

He did revolutionize the space launch services industry. And jump started the transition to electric cars. Doesn’t seem to know anything about tech though. And he’s burned his reputation to the ground this last year.

dbingham 3y ago
Did he do those things? Or did he just slap his name and brand on other people's work in those areas?
- simonswords82 3y ago
  Of course he did. He put his own money and reputation on the line for both businesses. There's a reason he was lauded before this Twitter/X debacle.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    > Of course he did. He put his own money and reputation on the line for both businesses. This describes an investor, not a genius founder/engineer. Also, IIRC his reputation was pretty low key before he got involved in Tesla. Not sure how meaningful "putting his reputation on the line" was at the time. The backlash against Musk was also already growing long before Twitter. Between constantly over-promising and under-delivering regarding Tesla, wacky ideas like the hyper loop, and his social media antics (pedo guy, taking Tesla private for $420) his image was already taking quite a hit.
    - gtirloni 3y ago
      > his social media antics (pedo guy, I didn't know this one and just read more about it. This is so absurd.
    - ulfw 3y ago
      He is an investor and marketer who wants to be a seen as a genius techie, which he clearly isn't. Hence his fake titles such as "Tesla Founder" (he wasn't) or "SpaceX Chief Technology Officer" (he isn't) or "Technoking" (I'm sorry?)

RugnirViking 3y ago

what buisness ventures does he have in the UK? I havent heard about that

mcv 3y ago

> Personally, I don't see what the hype is around Elon. Well I do. Or at least I did. He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla. He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz. He also contributed something to PayPal. I don't know what, and I personally hate PayPal, but some people clearly love it. Up to this point, he came across as a genius serial entrepreneur. I don't know if this was just luck+money, or that he really had some talent that contributed to these successes, but after this, people started lauding him as a real-life Tony Stark, and he apparently started to believe a bit too much in his own genius, and he started to do increasingly stupid things. But there absolutely was a time when the hype seemed absolutely justified.

ROTMetro 3y ago
Did Musk originally go to Roscosmos to license their tech and it was only after the laughed him out of the door that SpaceX pursued it's current strategy? His original plan was literally to be dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
kaba0 3y ago
I don’t know, is it really fair to attribute any of these to him? There are thousands of engineers/scientists that did the actual work. Hiring them (especially a competent manager who will manage the operations) is just putting money on the table. With a big enough wallet it’s not particularly hard. Also, spacex had plenty of government funds going to it — wouldn’t those same funds going to NASA resulted in similar results from taxpayer money? Afaik only paypal had some kind of actual work done by him personally (and frankly, I hate paypal with a burning passion so that’s not necessary a good thing).
- jmilloy 3y ago
  The people who did the work deserve credit. So does the person who had the vision and brought them together. Those engineers didn't get together of their own accord and nominate musk as a mascot. Regardless of how you want to summarize Musk's career in the context of his current behavior, which is getting tiresome, I think this is a false dichotomy.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago

<< Elon expects people to pay £100 a year for a social media site in the midst of a Cost of Living crisis. Honestly, this may be one of the good things he did. The entire population has gotten way too comfortable with free and it would be ideal if we could get away from this model.

tentacleuno 3y ago
While I agree that the free model is unsustainable, there are better ways than charging £10/mo for one social media site. A lot of people are struggling at the moment.
- stormfather 3y ago
  What would you suggest? Genuinely curious
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    Much of the Fediverse operates under a “pay what you can” model, and it seems plenty sustainable to me.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      It's not. None of the donation-based instances are in the black, if you factor in the cost of the admins and moderators. Every other month there is a big Mastodon instance going offline because it became too big for its own sake, the admin couldn't handle anymore then shuts it down. Much like any tech company, hardware and operational costs are a small fraction of the total expenses.
      - wizzwizz4 3y ago
        > if you factor in the cost of the admins and moderators It is not possible to factor that “cost” in. They're volunteers: they're donating their time, and their time has no market value. Electricity, however, does. > Every other month there is a big Mastodon instance going offline because Every other month there is a big website going offline. A big social group disbanding. This is the normal way of things: human social structures don't endure like friendships do.

_ph_ 3y ago

I wouldn't mind the $8 per month for a platform I use frequently if I get some nice benefits in usage and this enhances the quality of the platform. It is a bit naive to think such a service could be obtained for free. However, beyond the general development Twitter has taken since Musk took over and especially how the premium memberships were rolled out - the conflation of paying for the account with being verified has killed that as an option for me. Nowadays the blue mark rather is an anti-pattern to many. This is what you get when you sell "reputation".