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I don’t really see what Musk is trying to accomplish. Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvemen

• brtkdotse 3y ago
  It’s not a popular opinion on this site, and I’m probably going to be savagely downvoted, but whatever talent Musk had for business was eroded at least a decade ago by him surrounding himself with ego-stroking yes men. He drank his own cool aid.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • xena 3y ago
    I don't think he had any talent, he just got lucky and companies insulated themselves from him. With Twitter we're seeing what happens when companies don't insulate themselves from him.
    • coldtea 3y ago
      >he just got lucky Several times? Oscar Wilde wrote: “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Something of the kind, with an opposite sign, could be said for repeated business success. And in this case it's more than 2 times, and not just some small successess either. Isn't it more like "He's idiosyncratic and often erratic and/or has political views I don't like" that people translate to an absurd "he has no business talent"?
      • presbyterian 3y ago
        It’s easy to get lucky several times when you have a rich family that keeps you from truly failing
        • lordnacho 3y ago
          Basically the "no-life-risk" thesis. I don't think it's entirely crazy either, Elon was going to be comfortable whatever he did, and some people in that position will roll the dice several times, and some of those guys will win several times. Still takes some skill, I don't doubt that. But the main ingredient is risk.
        • coldtea 3y ago
          And yet I don't any great percentage of people from a "rich family" making multi-billion dollar companies. I'm also pretty sure with his first company sale he made much more money than his family ever had to begin with.
          • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
            > And yet I don't any great percentage of people from a "rich family" making multi-billion dollar companies. Because of the rarity of multi-billion dollar companies it makes more sense to flip the question - what are the demographics of those who found those companies? If the odds of doing something are 1:100 who is going to have better odds at succeeding - the person who gets 1 throw or 10 throws? Neither are guaranteed to succeed, but they both have a chance and one is much more likely than the other. That's what's at play here.
            • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
              There’s a lot more non-rich people though. So even at 1 throw each you’d expect them to be most of the successes under this theory. Of course there’s also hereditary factors at play that people like to ignore.
              • 3y ago
    • ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
      Not lucky, subsidized [1]. [1] Company with $15 million revenue in 2008 gets $465 million "loan" in 2009, https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/the-government-comes-through-for-tesla-with-a-465-million-loan-for-its-electric-sedan https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/the-government-comes-throu... https://www.statista.com/statistics/272120/revenue-of-tesla https://www.statista.com/statistics/272120/revenue-of-tesla Of course, Ford got $5.9 billion bailout, because capitalism is the lie profiteers tell to the wage slaves as they privatize profits while socializing losses.
      • ianai 3y ago
        I’m not seeing reputable sources reporting ford got bailouts. Nor do I see ford on this list. https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list
        • ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
          It's in the first paragraph of the linked article [1]. They were called "loans" in the government-speak of the post-2008 crash, but if you look at the semantics, they were just risk-free bailouts. [1] "the U.S. Secretary of Energy will be giving details about the first loans to come out of the government’s $25 billion program to help auto manufacturers. Ford got a $5.9 billion loan, but Tesla Motors, Silicon Valley’s electric car manufacturer, is receiving $465 million from the program"
          • dahdum 3y ago
            How is not a loan if they’ve been repaying it?
            • ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
              Can I, just a random citizen, get a loan from the government for not even billions or hundreds of millions but let's say $100,000? I will of course repay "in due course, at the appropriate juncture, in the fullness of time" [1], at 0% interest. There is nothing loan-like in government "loans" (of 2008, or of 2021, see the PPP heist [2]) almost by definition: no interest, no shares changing hands, not even a share buyback restriction (how most of the government loans are spent anyway). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKYEUXlYcSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKYEUXlYcSI [2] "How Did PPP Scammers Steal $100+ Billion", https://www.aura.com/learn/ppp-loan-fraud https://www.aura.com/learn/ppp-loan-fraud
    • valval 3y ago
      Nice hypothesis. I’ll remember you when I need to sell my Oceanside property in Arizona.
    • treeman79 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • kaba0 3y ago
        It’s no free speech, it’s just elon-style censorship. Somehow calling out his private jet trips is no longer free speech, right?
        • A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
          Sadly, yes. I am pretty out there on free speech and Elon is not messiah in this space. If anything, he may be one of those false prophets.
      • mcphage 3y ago
        > when he allowed free speech Well, the fact that he said a whole bunch of things about free speech, and proceeded to walk all of them back in short order—while still claiming to be a staunch supporter of free speech—probably pissed off a lot of people.
      • ethanbond 3y ago
        Wasn’t one of the first things he did to let Kanye back on the platform “for free speech” then immediately ban him again for posting a Swastika (which is clearly protected by free speech?) Seems to me like you’re just taking a known liar’s words at face value.
      • oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
        He hasn't "allowed free speech", he's just been more forgiving of some free speech and less forgiving of others, for political reasons. Actually, very free people want absolute free speech on a social media platform because we don't want 4chan, we want a place we can talk to friends and family.
      • aCoreyJ 3y ago
        Did he allow free speech or did he make different, and more opaque, decisions about who to ban while laying off anyone who handles appeals. Also being able to pay to make your speech more visible isn't what most people have in mind when they think of "free speech absolutism"
    • YetAnotherNick 3y ago
      How can you be so sure that it was just luck? Why should anyone trust you above Carmack and Karpathy who are talented without any doubt and who have worked closely with him, who has nothing but high praise for him.
    • amelius 3y ago
      > I don't think he had any talent He has a talent: self-promotion.
    • api 3y ago
      Once can be luck. Succeeding multiple times at very hard things is not luck. People can't wrap their heads around the idea that someone can be simultaneously a genius and an idiot. In the real world this is very common. I like to put it this way: how many musicians do you like who are geniuses at composition, drums, guitar, vocals, or some other musical skill but are absolutely intolerable assholes and/or complete lunatics in the rest of their lives? Can you still enjoy their music? Does their music cease to be good when you learn about their personality flaws? IMHO much of Elon's success can be attributed to two things: (1) He is at least a good enough engineer or has good enough "engineers' intuition" to hire people who know what they are talking about and get them working on the right things. He seems much stronger in physical areas like rockets can cars though, not software. (2) He doesn't listen to pessimists and nihilists who say things are impossible if, when reasoning from first principles, they can be shown to be quite possible. Example: ignoring people who said you can't land a rocket or that an EV could never do well in the market. Ignoring pessimism can be a superpower. I do think Elon shows signs of chronic burnout at this point. The far-right / conspiranoid brain worm infection he's developed is IMHO a symptom. Opportunistic infections take hold when the immune system is weak.
  • shri_krishna 3y ago
    > It’s not a popular opinion on this site Lmfao your opinion is literally the popular opinion on this site. Talk of bubbles within bubbles within bubbles!
    • passwordoops 3y ago
      I've come to view this qualifier as HN's answer to LinkedIn's humblebrag. Note I am guilty of using that qualifier once or twice prior to stating a popular opinion on HN...
      • mcv 3y ago
        I tend to downvote the "this will probably be downvoted but..." comments (except when it's an extraordinarily insightful comment). Just leave that sentence out. It adds nothing to the discussion.
        • InitialLastName 3y ago
          Yeah, any complaint/presaging about imaginary internet points gets an automatic downvote from me.
  • deburo 3y ago
    Why isn't he seeing his successful companies fail then?
    • baz00 3y ago
      Yet. They don't do anything which can't be done by someone else for less money and at less risk to investors.
    • rovr138 3y ago
      Which other ones did he run directly where he had the 'expertise'? Basically, they had other people to help guide it vs just Musk doing it himself.
      • coldtea 3y ago
        As opposed to Bezos and Jobs and Cook and Ellisson and Zuckerberg every other CEO, which doesn't have "people to run it"?
        • valval 3y ago
          [flagged]
        • kaba0 3y ago
          They fail to amuse me either, like, CEOs not being some gods is not a controversial statement, you ain’t disproving anything. That myth (or rather propaganda) that they are some übermensch that work more than you could ever imagine and are so productive and it’s all thanks to the magic of powernaps or whatever bullshit they make up to sell you the temporarily embarrassed billionaire tale is thoroughly debunked. They are ordinary people who got into a very lucky situation and didn’t fuck up too bad.
          • coldtea 3y ago
            >CEOs not being some gods is not a controversial statement, you ain’t disproving anything. Bro, do you even HN? That's like the gospel here...
  • scarmig 3y ago
    I think it's more that being terminally online has given him the brain worms when it comes to Twitter, and everything he does with Twitter has to be interpreted through the mass of brain worms.
    • mcv 3y ago
      He does come across as Twitter-addicted. And now I'm wondering if Trump's lunacy may also have been caused by Twitter, and that he may have been a more reasonable person in the past.
      • delecti 3y ago
        Everything I've heard is that Trump has been regarded as a moron for more than 50 years. He was a moron, raised by uncaring parents, and is now dealing with dementia. I'm sure the addictive nature of social media engagement didn't help, but as a person Trump is just like that.
        • rvba 3y ago
          Didnt Musk smoke drugs?
          • delecti 3y ago
            As far as I've heard, yes, though I'm not sure why it would be relevant in this conversation. I don't expect there are many rich or famous people who haven't.
            • rvba 3y ago
              [flagged]
  • shortrounddev2 3y ago
    Gavin Belson: All I hear from everybody is good news. Have I just surrounded myself with sycophants, who are just telling me whatever I want to hear, regardless of the truth? Denpok: *gulp* ... no. Gavin Belson: Thank you Denpok. I really needed to hear that.
    • 101008 3y ago
      What a great TV show. I miss Sunday nights...
    • tunnuz 3y ago
      This scene is perfect.
    • rchaud 3y ago
      Any time I see Naval Ravikant's mystical musings on the philosophy of innovation or whatever, I think of Denpok guy in Silicon Valley.
      • SkyMarshal 3y ago
        Naval cribs a lot of his musings from various books, but never credits them, passes them off as his own. Folks who have read most or all of the same books he has can recognize the source. He so desperately wants to be a philosopher, but is cheating at it.
        • davnicwil 3y ago
          Does any philosopher mostly come up with their own unique ideas in a black box, uninfluenced by and not based upon ideas that preceded them in culture and literature? This is an actual question, I don't know the answer, but it does seem extremely unlikely to me that this would be the case.
          • Kye 3y ago
            I don't think getting ideas from elsewhere was the issue.
  • mcv 3y ago
    That Musk's genius acumen were either fake or something that he has since lost, is not an unpopular opinion, but the ruling wisdom here and elsewhere. It's true, lots of people did fall for his Tony Stark act, but the past year has really opened people's eyes to the fact that it was all narcissism. The signs were there long before, but they were easy to ignore in light of the success of innovative companies like Tesla and SpaceX. But now people are wondering whether the success of those companies was really because of him, or that we was just there to provide the money and bask in the glory.
    • meroes 3y ago
      I became convinced when he said he was putting CPUs in the Tesla Wall batteries during the cpu shortage for mining. I knew there were signs (cybertruck, the robot gimmick possibly being earlier one) but that was it for me. This is separate from his personality which I disliked earlier.
    • mschuster91 3y ago
      > or that we was just there to provide the money and bask in the glory The "raising money" part is the inarguably most important part of any startup. Given enough money, you can ride through absolutely anything - and the kind of projects that Musk provided with money always need a crapton of them: Tesla to even have a tiny chance at surviving against the established behemoths, and SpaceX because (prior to them) spaceflight was something for rich developed nation states only.
  • monero-xmr 3y ago
    Criticizing elon musk is very popular on HN…
  • drexlspivey 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • prasadjoglekar 3y ago
    Maybe; and yet Tesla still rolls off cars off the assembly line and SpaceX is still reliably launching and recovering rockets. He's playing with his own money, no different than Bezos losing money and 500K subs on the WaPo.
    • phone8675309 3y ago
      Teslas notoriously has very shit QA before they're released to customers at this point, and is this the same SpaceX that destroyed their launch pad on the last launch? Real stellar performance.
  • varelse 3y ago
    [dead]
  • okeuro49 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • stormfather 3y ago
      It's such a radioactive opinion on here that you got downvoted just for saying it exists and is unpopular. You didn't even endorse it. Wow. I noticed that Musk became unpopular here right after the media and social media turned on him. It's disappointing that even top-tier intelligent people don't usually think for themselves.
      • okeuro49 3y ago
        Now not only downvoted, but also censored. Despite the issue being covered in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/01/the-twitter-files-should-disturb-liberal-critics-of-elon-musk-and-heres-why https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/01/the-tw...
  • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    If you read the history, it sounds like many of his... dysfunctions... go back to the start of his business career, and the latest debacles look a lot like stuff that went down at PayPal/X.com over 20 years ago; where it sounds like he got evicted and Peter Thiel had to clean up the mess. And in fact this X.com renaming sounds like him dealing with personal baggage and vendettas from back then. Basically the opposite of the stoic and calculating personality one expects a giant of capitalism to be. So I actually just wonder if it's more than there was a 10 year period of Musk... getting lucky... by surrounding himself with some competence. That, and the investing world after 2008, with its intensely low interest rates and high tech-sector profits made it easy to "swim naked." The efforts of a narcissistic showman Dunning-Kruger personality like Musk... are a great place to dump your money as long as you're not the last one holding the bag when shit hits the fan (aka Twitter).
  • GhostVII 3y ago
    I don't think he really had special talent for business, he had strong beliefs that happened to line up with what was profitable at the time. I don't think when he invested in Tesla or started SpaceX he was thinking about whether it made business sense - he just wanted to build futuristic technology, and he was one of the few people willing to spend a lot of money on a new company to actually make it happen. That doesn't really mean he is a genius at business, just that he is really good at pitching his vision and getting people excited about it.
  • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > at least a decade ago by him surrounding himself with ego-stroking yes men It’s more recent. The Sacks-Chamatch-Calacanis axis didn’t go into gear until Covid. Somewhere between the election of Trump and lockdown, the rot set in. That suggests it’s still excusable.
  • Symmetry 3y ago
    I can see why you think that, but I think you're wrong. Musk's success in Zip2 and X.com was mostly realizing there was a market opportunity and working long hours personally on the code to get the sites up and running. With SpaceX and Telsa mostly his value-add has been looking at things and saying "This isn't elegantly designed enough" sort of like Steve Jobs but for internals. And he seems to be right often enough to be successful. But he seems to think that he has this ability for software engineering and user interfaces too, but he doesn't. Which is why he was canned at PayPal and why he's making such a mess of Twitter. All people are composed of both strengths and weaknesses. The important part is finding a position which plays to your strenths. Sadly, I think critical introspection is a strength that Elon doesn't possess.
    • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > critical introspection is a strength that Elon doesn't possess He absolutely does. We’ve seen it in his prior reversals, when fortunes at his firms were down and he changed course savvily. The sycophants he’s surrounded himself with, namely, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, do not. And that’s rubbing off on him.
      • mschuster91 3y ago
        The sycophants are one thing, but he's gone off the loon end himself for extremely personal stuff as well such as the names of his children with Grimes.
        • Robotbeat 3y ago
          Grimes also wanted a weird name.
          • omnibrain 3y ago
            Yes, but she‘s an artist.
            • 3y ago
  • bipop5000 3y ago
    Imagine being the world's richest man, even for a little bit. I would imagine that does some stuff to your ego.
  • rossjudson 3y ago
    Do any of these "yes men" have names or positions? Do you have an example? A lot of these criticisms read like "extrapolations on an unsupported basis that aligns with my current over-simplification".
  • BrotherBisquick 3y ago
    > It’s not a popular opinion on this site Oh come on.
  • goodbyesf 3y ago
    > It’s not a popular opinion on this site, and I’m probably going to be savagely downvoted At best, it's hard to take someone seriously when they intentionally lie about the obvious. At worst, it makes it seem like you are part of a pr campaign. Can you point to a post where you were savagely downvoted for criticizing elon and anything having to do with twitter? I genuinely interested. Maybe your experience on hn is different from everyone else's.
    • kergonath 3y ago
      > Can you point to a post where you were savagely downvoted for criticizing elon and anything having to do with twitter? I see more people complaining about hidden posts than hidden posts (which I do read every time, and I have seen once or twice a hidden post that should not have been). It’s difficult to take seriously people banging on about a down-voting cabal being after them because they’re so edgy and right.
  • Pxtl 3y ago
    I tend to think it's more internet-poisoning than yes-men. When he was sleeping in his office and living and breathing his companies, he didn't have time to get corrupted by social media. Then he slowed down once his companies got big-enough and stable-enough to run themselves. His transphobia (combined with his hatred of the COVID policies that were hurting his bottom line) led him down the worst internet rabbit-holes and now he's off the deep end.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• agumonkey 3y ago
  Theories about a global service app ala Chinese Platforms... Would make sense to try to recover losses by more in-app sales.
• simou 3y ago
  I speculate that musk is trying to build something like weChat for the US
  • prng2021 3y ago
    “ X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.” You’re rebranding information from the article as your own speculation?
    • TehCorwiz 3y ago
      He’s said as much personally back at the beginning. Notably, WeChat enjoys a government monopoly in China. Musk was hoping that the critical mass of Twitter would let him achieve the he same here.
      • actionfromafar 3y ago
        He should have bought Facebook then.
      • rchaud 3y ago
        Many of Musk's plans for Twitter appear to been formulated after the fact. Twitter was first going to be a safe harbour for free speech. Then it was going to the launch site for De Santis' presidential campaign (ignoring the irony of championing politicians who can't sign censorious bills fast enough). Now it'll be a payment platform? People don't want to come to Twitter to spend money, it's reality TV for the internet -- nobody's paying for that. It would be like purchasing a sports team, and setting up a credit card signup booth at the stadium.
    • zirgs 3y ago
      The same account for a bank and a shitposting platform. What could possibly go wrong?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• deadbunny 3y ago
  $10 on the rebrand being so he can claim to be the founder of x.com.
  • BananaPuncakes 3y ago
    God I'd forgotten about X.com. Holy hell he's still on that tragic dream.
  • gwd 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • dangerwill 3y ago
      Why did you go to GPT-4 to get this basic history? It's mostly stolen from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com and manages to omit 2 of the 4 founders names.
• JSavageOne 3y ago
  > No product improvements Removing the tweet limit was a massive improvement (something I'd wanted for a decade). Showing view counts is also nice. I don't like the login-walls and selling blue checkmarks, but I understand that the company was financially struggling prior to Elon. In any case my impression has been that Twitter has improved more since Elon than prior to that. My Twitter usage is definitely higher than before, though admittedly that could be unrelated to Elon.
  • joshstrange 3y ago
    What “tweet limit” are you talking about? Twitter went to 280 well before Musk and I’m almost certain view counts were there before him as well in the little bar chart icon.
    • coldtea 3y ago
      He talks about this tweet limit: "The character limit for subscribers in the U.S. is now 4,000—more than 14 times the existing 280-character limit, which remains in place for all non-subscribers and Twitter Blue users outside of the United States".
      • joshstrange 3y ago
        I don’t browse Twitter since 3rd party apps got kicked to the curb but I think it’s telling that not a single tweet I have seen in the interim was longer than 280 (aka one that was popular enough to be posted here or somewhere else I’d see). I think less of people who have a blue check now. The idea of paying for “less ads” and shit features would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.
        • oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
          The humorous thing is that a lot some people are paying $8/month to then post tweets that most people (everyone?) only see the beginning of.
• fakedang 3y ago
  PayPal only worked UX-wise because of Levchin and Thiel, a former Mafia member told me once. Musk never had a knack for keeping things spic and clean - it's well known how he interferes in codebases to add in his shitty bad-practices code, or how he advocated for using Windows over Linux at Paypal. Musk is a business genius alright, but not what I would call a product genius like Jobs was.
  • agd 3y ago
    I think his work at Tesla displays product genius. The cars are best in class, have transformed car UX, and are selling like hot cakes.
    • AlexandrB 3y ago
      > have transformed car UX True in the sense that it's made it worse. The "giant touchscreen and fewer knobs" UX sucks once the novelty wears off. Then there are things like the "yoke" and the retracting door handles... I think many Tesla fans confuse novelty for improvement.
      • agd 3y ago
        I think there's good evidence here: Teslas consistently have high review scores, and are selling in huge numbers. E.g. The Model Y was the top selling car in the world for Q1 this year. Edit. The 'top selling car' figure is contested (see below) and depends on how you define single model. However multiple news sites (including reuters/The Verge etc) have reported this story without retraction. We also have more recent stories saying the Model Y is the highest selling car in Europe for H1. Whatever way you look at it, these cars are selling very well.
        • HarrisonFisk 3y ago
          It wasn’t the top selling car. That seems to be something Elon made up: https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a44600661/is-tesla-model-y-the-worlds-best-selling-car-nope-not-even-close/ https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a44600661/is-tes...
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• easyThrowaway 3y ago
  I'm still convinced he's just going for a "clever" way to declare bankruptcy in order to not pay full price for the Twitter acquisition. Make it look like a business... "accident", publicly say twitter actually never had a chance to get out of debt, Sell the assets, refinance the whole thing at a fraction of the original buyout price, threw a few millions to the creditors and get away with the whole thing.
  • rovr138 3y ago
    I've thought about this too and have mentioned it to friends a couple of times. Not sure if bankruptcy, but it's a way to get tax credits if it's not successful.
    • RugnirViking 3y ago
      i dont remember who said it but isnt there a famous adage in the accounting world that its not a smart idea to get tax credits by making actual real losses. You're supposed to find ways to make book losses without actually lighting real money on fire
      • rchaud 3y ago
        That's why companies pay for acquisitions or mergers primarily in stock. It keeps cash reserves available for other uses. If the acquisition flops, you can write down the value, take a hit on the income statement, and lower your tax owed for the year.
        • lotsofpulp 3y ago
          That is why sellers do not always agree to accept stock instead of cash.
          • rchaud 3y ago
            When in the "billions" range, the deals are going to be light on cash. That's how Adobe can "pay" $20bn for Figma using stock.
• madeofpalk 3y ago
  As they said on The Verge podcast - it's like he's addicted to cigarettes and he bought the cigarette factory.
  • worldsayshi 3y ago
    Sounds accurate. He has no real talent for managing a social media platform. He probably has some (more or less accidental) talent for managing certain kinds of tech businesses. But now he's sticking to an addiction that doesn't serve anyone.
  • rchaud 3y ago
    bought the factory, and then slashed the already minimal product quality assurance the factory was operating under. The top replies to tweets these days are all paid blue check hustle vultures.
• jasfi 3y ago
  He's rebranding. It seems apt since Twitter is becoming quite a different platform. The URL is still twitter.com, and it looks like they're haven't got rid of the Tweet button yet. That's a powerful marketing verb. But now the platform is X and you still tweet? Seems like a mismash of the old and new brand. Still in progress perhaps.
  • bob-09 3y ago
    The URL is actually X.com moving forward, and tweets are to be called x's.
    • vwcx 3y ago
      Thinking about twitter as an e(x) is quite helpful in weaning myself off the hellhole of a website.
• appleflaxen 3y ago
  Do you mean... MyForge? The new (old) social media platform for open source?
  • dustrider 3y ago
    Is that back?
• bko 3y ago
  > No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam, and a weird desperate-looking rebrand. What are you talking about? There has been more change at Twitter in the last year than in the last ten. From editable comments, subscriptions, revenue sharing, blue checkmark for sale, alternative check marks for govts and org, culling of old accounts, API restrictions, forcing people to put parody in acct. I noticed a lot less spam as well. A year and a half ago I remember every top reply being crypto scams from fake vitalik accounts I get you prob don't like the guy but saying the product is unchanged is just delusional. Maybe some of the changes are worse but there have been a lot of changes
  • rsynnott 3y ago
    No-one's claiming it's _unchanged_. The word they used was 'improvements'.
    • bko 3y ago
      The only change I would say is not an improvement is the api restrictions. Which ones don't you like?
      • bluefishinit 3y ago
        Rate limits, even more censorship, more blue checkmarks, blue checkmarks sorted to the top of threads, can't see accounts if not logged in, growth in scam ads, musk's tweets promoted to everyone's feeds... I'm sure there's more. I stopped using the service because it was never great but now it's one of the worst properties on the internet.
        • rsynnott 3y ago
          > musk's tweets promoted to everyone's feeds... Almost surprisingly, blocking him does still appear to work. Though it will sometimes have him in the list of suggestions to follow, even if you've blocked him...
        • ajmurmann 3y ago
• Phil_Latio 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • kaba0 3y ago
    A well-engineered product won’t suddenly catastrophically explode the day it is handed over. But firing that many engineers is definitely a death sentence sooner or later, as we can see from the many hiccups.
• csomar 3y ago
  He is not a good engineer or strategist. He is good at marketing though. He got lucky with Space X and the rockets launched. He got a shit-ton of funding for Tesla, the whole business doesn't make sense (competitors can do better with tighter margins) but people threw money at him, so it worked. So he thought he is a genius and can make this one work too. He realized his mistake (tried to get off the deal) but when the deal stuck, he thought he could run this thing; and turn it over to a massive success. His latest money (valuation) came from his Twitter pumping/dumping shitposting. That's why he wanted to have Twitter and that's what he is doing with Twitter right now. He is obviously burning Twitter to the ground and with it Tesla, which has a 800bn valuation as of today... I just hope Space X survives all this madness.
  • rvnx 3y ago
    The current vision for SpaceX is great, the product as well. Let's not forget that the initial plan of SpaceX was to meet and get drunk with Russian leaders to buy missiles from them and resell them to US market. Imagine the nightmare if it actually had worked as planned. Regarding implementation in SpaceX, the success is mostly due to very good engineers and to a less bureaucratic process, where you can move fast and break things. The NASA is a big boat that cannot steer due to political issues. It works ok but it is extremely slow and expensive.
    • ajmurmann 3y ago
      I thought he wanted to just buy a single rocket to fly a plant with a webcam to Mars to inspire people.
    • Covzire 3y ago
      Musk's companies operate without a lot of the kind of beaurocratic bloat found in most other auto makers or NASA. No dozens of DEI administrators making everyone's work life miserable, pretending it's not just politics being rammed down their throat, treating grown adults like children, etc. That alone gives him a competitive advantage.
      • 3y ago
• netbioserror 3y ago
  The only thing Twitter has ever had going for it is its brand. The rebranding is weird and indicative of an obsession on Musk's part, but everyone needs to stop pretending that Twitter was anything more than that brand, which could disappear at any moment. It was a financial black hole propped up by frankly stupid amounts of capital injection, made briefly profitable by the black swan of Trump hysteria. I have yet to hear a plan for Twitter less stupid than the one currently being executed by Musk.
  • dmix 3y ago
    People aren't going to suddenly stop calling it Twitter and tweets. I doubt it will have much impact on marketing. It's most just a domain name and some corporate heading stuff. The only utility and potential confusion is a single letter domain for linking to tweets until people get used to it. But on sfuff like imessage, SERPs etc it pulls in the <title> tag above the domain so it's not the only signal
    • netbioserror 3y ago
      If sub-generational slang can come and go in a single-digit number of years, I think the population at large will have little problem forgetting "Twitter" and "tweet" as general terminology. The verb "to google" has stuck around because Google is still around, though I'm sure there's some threshold of time where terminology gets passed down and sticks (velcro, kleenex, etc).
  • ajmurmann 3y ago
    Twitter missed out big time in search. There is so much high-quality content on that platform, yet it's practically undiscoverable. I've way too often spent 15 minutes+ trying to find a tweet I saw at some point. Usually I never find it again. Search is a great save for ad revenue. Leave Twitter as is otherwise, add search and cut opex. Twitter was great for what it was from a user perspective.
    • phone8675309 3y ago
      > There is so much high-quality content on that platform, yet it's practically undiscoverable. That problem really must be bad because I don't think I've seen anything of major value on Twitter in my entire time using it.
• seydor 3y ago
  > I don’t really see what Musk is trying to accomplish. Twitter wasnt profitable or sustainable so he s going to experiment in whatever way possible only to realize what everybody knows: mass media is not profitable in the financial sense, but in the political
• MrMan 3y ago
  [dead]
• Danjoe4 3y ago
  The product has had several new features added, is more performant, the bots have been culled, and a rebrand is common when a company is going in a new direction. Not to mention when Elon first bought the company he announced his goal was to create an "everything app" called X so I'd hardly call the move "desperate".
  • geekles 3y ago
    I agree with this statement. Twitter as a platform and product works better today than it did a year ago. Less bots makes a huge difference. It's also not hard to imagine why they lost 50% of their advertisers. 50% kind of lines up with the percentage of "woke" (horrible label, but whatever) companies out there who basically "had to" pull their ad dollars to not piss off the camp they put themselves in. Prognostication is fun, but to be honest, we don't really have any idea whether or not this rebranding and redirection will work. Time will tell. I, however, applaud people willing to take moonshots.
    • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > companies out there who basically "had to" pull their ad dollars to not piss off the camp they put themselves in Musk used to be political Teflon. He threw away that bipartisan edge for no gain. That was one of the beginnings of his Howard Hughes analogy.
    • edmundsauto 3y ago
      Scaling down engineering and product, reducing revenue by significant amounts in order to reach "profitability" is not directionally in line with a moonshot. SpaceX, sure - but what he's doing to Twitter is straight from a private equity / corporate raider textbook.
  • otikik 3y ago
    > the bots have been culled Source, please?
    • zimpenfish 3y ago
• slily 3y ago
  > No product improvements That's false though. Some of the improvements are gated behind a subscription, but HD video streams with more options and longer durations (allowing full movies to be distributed on it), longer tweets (reducing the need for "threads" which are obnoxious to read on Twitter and have led people to write bots that put them together), view counts, bringing back the chronological timeline and increased transparency are all net improvements. What makes this surprising, or sad, or funny depending on your perspective, is that among the rapid product improvements, he sprinkles odd, impulsive decisions with little context and controversial messages that alienate a bunch of people. I guarantee you that without that he'd be hailed as a genius by the people who are calling him Elmo and pretending that revolutionizing the car industry and satellite Internet was "just luck". If there's a lesson to be learned there it's that social media addiction can spoil anyone.
• quags 3y ago
  I used to see news stories with tweets in it. I can’t recall many recently except for musks tweets. While the choices seem questionable Twitter is constantly in the news and getting talked about. If any publicity is good publicity Musk has certainly been able to continually be part of the news cycle.
• q87b 3y ago
  Musk might very well be just a useful idiot to kill a platform that was globally connecting people for positive, political change. Twitter played crucial roles in bringing down Mubarak in Egypt, in the Euromaidan and elsewhere. 40 billion dollars is just two years of Gazprom profits.
  • greyman 3y ago
    "kill a platform" is an overstatement, isn't it? I follow several dozens people at twitter and they are all there, posting regularly as before. Honestly, I didn't notice any degradation of twitter during Musk era. There is Andrew Tate shitposting now, and for a few hours twitter logo was changed to Doge, but what else?
    • q87b 3y ago
      Did you not notice the huge increase in abuse against green, tolerant or otherwise progressive people (fascists like to call them "woke")?
• ak_111 3y ago
  Not a fan and don't use the product, but giving away substantial money to highly engaged users on the platform is a very novel and interesting product idea which I doubt would have ever seen the light of day in a public company, and has the potential to be a disruptive business model. Imagine the discussion if the idea was presented in a public company with the CFO in the room "Rather than spend money trying to attract churned users, we decided to use it instead to reward loyal and highly engaged users even though we are pretty sure their engagement level would be high no matter what, and in fact they would happily pay us to use the platform".
  • lolinder 3y ago
    Isn't this just what YouTube has been doing for years? It's just acknowledging that on Twitter there's an implicit division been content producers and consumers, and that the content producers are getting close to leaving and taking their followers with them now that there are viable competitors. Paying them to keep producing content is hardly novel.
    • ak_111 3y ago
      I think there is a significant difference conceptually between the two. The novelty is that it was more like compensating users who are highly active in leaving popular comments on youtube, the more popular their comment the more they get.
      • lolinder 3y ago
        Not really, because almost no one comes to YouTube for the comments, so paying people to comment would be stupid. In contrast, most people are on Twitter to read tweets produced by a tiny minority of Twitter users. These users are directly analogous to YouTube content creators (and indeed, many YouTubers are also active with large numbers of followers on Twitter). It doesn't take great business acumen to see the parallel, all you have to do is look at the distribution of follower counts.
• nashashmi 3y ago
  he was never really a product genius. he was an inspirer. And he inspired people to work hard and dream big. and so they did. and he let them be. yet borrowed their knowledge. And looked smarter than he really was. Now he is full of himself and he doesn't know how to move forward. So he stumbles repeatedly. And then regrets it. But never is humbled by any of that. He is also no longer surrounded by people who are intelligent. He is surrounded by sycophants.
• iamsanteri 3y ago
  What people don‘t seem to take into account here is that Elon was forced to buy the company due to a binding offer he made but later found out user numbers to be manipulated and so on. He‘s already burned down the 40 billion market cap to less than 20 billion today and he doesn‘t have much to lose. He is meme-style trying to enjoy the blunder he made while having a tiny but an exponential chance he still may hit it big by doing something outright crazy such as his long-time aspiration of x.com (the everything company). He is finding out currently that social-human systems work very differently than engineering systems, and he is not very talented at all on the human side of things. Don‘t take him too seriously just as he doesn‘t take himself all that seriously either. And hey, there‘s always the upshot opportunity of it going big, but that is a tiny chance by know. To me it looks like everyone who‘s trying to take him seriously by now with all this are making themselves laughing stock. And Musk couldn‘t care less. For me the only problem is that I‘m a Tesla shareholder and I‘ve seen a sort of dilution and all his suffering first-hand, where a single share of mine has already turned into 15 since I bought it. Thus of course I have skin in the game, but I still consider this all as a big meme-like joke. Soon we‘re all dead anyway, so let‘s not think about things too serious and money is just money for most people who have it. It‘s no bigger than life. Have fun and enjoy the ride, our 100 years on this planet are a sliver so we‘ll all be enjoying it in our own messed up ways. Elon does it this way. This is how I see it.
  • vlovich123 3y ago
    > What people don‘t seem to take into account here is that Elon was forced to buy the company due to a binding offer he made but later found out user numbers to be manipulated and so on. My understanding is that manipulated numbers would have been a legit reason to exit the deal but it turned out that Musk couldn’t provide that and thus was forced to go through with the offer. Am I misremembering?
    • iamsanteri 3y ago
      This could be the case, but he himself claims it to be more the way I said it. The details are obscure but I tend to believe his word rather than the passionate hater-horde and an army of mis-representers that are so many in number today. It’s Elon’s blunder so I don’t care all that much. Too bad for him!
• jonnycomputer 3y ago
  I think he's trying to transform the platform into an "app for everything" (like WeChat or Meituan Dianping in China), one that does communication, financial transactions, commerce, food orders, ticketing, the whole gamut. And so, X. Which doesn't mean anything in particular.
• ilamont 3y ago
  This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform. Dying platforms are often the result of negative network effects, superior competitors, and self-centered founders who believe early successes make them brilliant business leaders and experts in everything else they touch.
• goodbyesf 3y ago
  > I don’t really see what Musk is trying to accomplish. Have you followed his twitter account? Watch his interviews. Read his SEC filings? He's been pretty open about his intentions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corp. > Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam That's not what 'Death by Private Equity' is or looks like. > and a weird desperate-looking rebrand. Desperate weird rebrand? The rebrand happens months ago. It's not a new thing. "The concept for X solidified in October 2022, when Musk tweeted that acquiring Twitter is "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app"." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Corp. Elon is doing what exactly what he said he was going to do but you are twisting into some bizarre 'Death by Private Equity' that doesn't make sense because you don't like elon? Isn't that the gist of it? The anti-elon pr campaign is no different than the anti-zuckerburg campaign.
  • rvz 3y ago
    > Elon is doing what exactly what he said he was going to do but you are twisting into some bizarre 'Death by Private Equity' that doesn't make sense because you don't like elon? Isn't that the gist of it? Exactly. It was going to eventually be rebranded as soon as he acquired it. Not sure why HNers here are seemingly very surprised about this and still screaming at the changes? But it is quite funny to see lots of HNers here already showing signs of memory loss in less than a year since he made that comment with lots of emotional reactions to the news. > The anti-elon pr campaign is no different than the anti-zuckerburg campaign. Absolutely. I remember when the 'anti-zuckerburg' campaign of HNers and the media all screamed and attempted to prothesize the death of Meta Platforms when it's stock plunged to $90. Even before the layoffs, Zuckerberg was the 'villain' somehow and is somehow called by the most angriest of people a 'Nazi'. Now it is 200% up in less than a year and now the media's opinions have changed like the weather and are now cheering him again. Today, Elon is somehow now the 'villain' of the year because of the layoffs and buying Twitter and now they are even angrier that Twitter / X did not 'die' immediately before 2023 as incorrectly predicted. So every speed bump Elon makes to Twitter / X is now 100x magnified from now on by the media. Either way, the predictions of both the deaths of Twitter / X and Meta Platforms by the media and on HN has always been greatly exaggerated.
• detourdog 3y ago
  Here is my theory. That giant Tesla supercomputer is an updated real time global map of everything a Tesla sees. The giant satellite network is to move the data around. Twitter is the login window to Musk world.
• hackitup7 3y ago
  It's not even good PE. Like unironically Vista and Thoma Bravo are too smart to do stuff like this. This is like MBA search funds rebranding the trash disposal company they purchased.
• weego 3y ago
  My favourite part is firing everything but a skeleton crew and now claiming the goal is to build the wests wechat. Might need a few more employees for that.
• Pxtl 3y ago
  The emperor has no clothes. Whether it's just his natural personality, or serious internet-poisoning, or some kind of substance problem, Musk has a habit of making rash decisions, and buying Twitter for way more than it was worth was one of those. So he's scrambling. Trying to find any way to make it pencil out, using all the stunts he can think of. "X" is just another one he'd kept in his back pocket for decades. He'd obviously always liked the brand, since "X.com" was part of his PayPal story, and he named his space company "SpaceX", and one of his Tesla models, and his kid.
• andreygrehov 3y ago
  > I don’t really see what Musk is trying to accomplish. Have you taken the time to understand? > No product improvements I disagree. Musk owns Twitter for less than 9 months. Just off the top of my head: * view counts * revenue share with creators * fewer bots * long videos * improved spaces * no censorship > This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform Inept MBAs do whatever it takes to bootlick advertisers. Not the case with the today's Twitter. > He’s supposed to be a product genius According to whom? I've never heard anybody saying so. However, here is an anecdote from my personal experience: I recently purchased Tesla and the UX was as simple as buying shampoo on Amazon–just a few clicks from the app. > He was supposed to bankroll exciting new ventures Isn't that what he is trying to do? X is the experiment to launch an exciting new venture. Give him a chance? > Instead it’s kind of like MySpace meets SourceForge I'm confused on this analogy–cannot see the connection. Please, elaborate. P.S. Your reactstudio.com certificate is not valid.