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Why did people ever think Larry Ellison and Saudi princes would give Elon Musk money to help a platform that had a strong track record of enabling people power

Why did people ever think Larry Ellison and Saudi princes would give Elon Musk money to help a platform that had a strong track record of enabling people power movements like OWS, Arab Spring, and BLM? Don't people follow the money any more? Come on now. Everything Musk has done has made the platform less attractive. Everything. It's a long list of idiocy. Firing key talent, breaking things, pissing off advertisers over and over, pissing off users, breaking the blue checks, the awful rebranding, etc. Why are supposedly smart people seriously thinking that this isn't deliberate? I really don't get it. It's plain as day.

codingdave 3y ago
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
- mandmandam 3y ago
  You think the richest man in the world, along with his ultra-wealthy Saudi and mega-Zionist backers, are genuinely championing free speech as Musk so often claims? Puh-lease. The simplest explanation here is malice. Otherwise you have to believe that the wealthiest people in the world, experienced business people with the world's best paid advisors, are destroying Twitter through sheer business incompetence. I don't buy it for a second and I'm shocked that people really believe this is just simple stupidity. Attributing the destructive actions of well-known gaslighting lying billionaires to stupidity is honestly one of the weirdest things I can imagine. Sure, they make mistakes - but repeatedly, over and over, for years, and only with this one company? ... Nah.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Wouldn't it have been more effective for him to have just closed it on day one? Why leave it around for years, and have 75% of the users still there? That's being pretty incompetent at destroying it.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      The same reason that when a military force used to seize radio stations and telephone exchanges, it took them over rather than demolishing them.
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      There's a word for this: "Plausible deniability". Overly blatant actions like that have a tendency to rile people up to tipping points. Then there's the money - closing it day 1 leaves money on the table. There's the ego. Even Musk fan boys would have a hard time swallowing the wilful destruction of a beloved (and expensive) site. For those and other reasons (anigbrowl hit the nail on the head!), it's far easier to just gut all the parts that made the platform a threat to the mega-yacht class.
      - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
        > There's a word for this: "Plausible deniability". There's a word for _this_: "self-sealing" [0]. A believer in a conspiracy theory, when presented with evidence contrary to the conspiracy theory, will often "reinterpret it as originating from the conspiracy" [1], or otherwise treat it "as further evidence for the conspiracy" [1]. The simplest explanation for elmu acting like an uninformed, out-of-touch narcissist is that is who he is. Many narcissists genuinely believe they are pro-free-speech even while they attack speech they dislike. Toss him on the pile. 0: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585 1: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scholcom/246/ https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scholcom/246/
        krapp 3y ago
        At this point it's pretty clear that when Elon Musk talks about "free speech" he means the freedom to spread right-wing speech without consequence. I honestly believe a lot of what he's doing is, in his mind, liberating the site from the "woke mind virus" he believes turned his daughter trans. Most of the rest is boredom, because I also don't believe he really cares about the platform. He didn't even really want it, but he's stuck with it, so he's mostly just screwing around. If you interrogate Musk's action from the point of view of the bored, redpilled sociopath behind the mask of a brilliant entrepreneur playboy genius engineer, a lot of his decisions make sense.
  - Moomoomoo309 3y ago
    "Only with this one company" is quite the statement on its own. Elon's blunders are numerous and across most of his companies, they are not limited to Twitter.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    ... I mean, the Saudis, and the likes of Ellison, invest in dumb shit all the time! Like, Ellison invested in Theranos. He has a track record in investing in nonsense. (I don't understand how Theranos wasn't more damaging to the "rich people are magical super genius investors" meme common on here, but here we are.) > experienced business people with the world's best paid advisors All the advisors in the world are no use if you don't listen to them because you think you know better.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  That's a good maxim, but when all the behavior points in the same direction it becomes facile to cling to it. A stupid person's decisions wouldn't be so consistent.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    debatable. many morons are entirely predictable; sometimes you only have one or two cards to play.
k12sosse 3y ago
.. don't forget refusing to engage with any press and automating a pooh emoji as an autoreply
- chrisjc 3y ago
  Though it certainly takes care of the usual "We reached out to ???, but they didn't respond" statement.
deeg 3y ago
I am absolutely sure it's not deliberate because Musk renamed it to x.com. He's been looking to use that name for years and he wouldn't have renamed Twitter if he was planning on destroying it. No, I think it's easier to say that a billionaire who surrounds himself with sycophants and ketamine end up making a lot of stupid mistakes.
- fragmede 3y ago
  I don't know if that's true. In order to be sure, we'd need to have a billionaire surrounded by just sycophants, and then just ketamine, and finally one surrounded by neither, and see how they fare. Really, to be sure, we'd want to have a large dataset, so we need a whole bunch of billionaires to take part in this experiment. Of course, finding willing billionaires will be hard, so instead we'll need to create some willing billionaires for this to happen. I volunteer to be one of them, so I'll just need a $1,000,000,000 dollars for my part in this experiment. (And maybe syncophants and ketamine, depending on which group we want me to be a part of.) Will you help fund it? It's for science.
  - krapp 3y ago
    This is Hacker News. Best we can do is millionaires tweaked out on Red Bull and adderall.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    this sounds like GPT nonsense written to defend billionaires and deflect the discussion. that wealthy and powerful people have sycophants and live in their own universes is heavy documented throughout history, in various cultures and countries -- Ming Emperors, Roman Caesars, Incan Kings, etc.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Lol your GPT detector is off. What would you even feed ChatGPT to get to make a joke like that?
rsynnott 3y ago
I mean, maybe it's a grand conspiracy, but Occam's Razor says it's more likely to just be incompetence. Generally when a rich idiot buys a business they don't understand but have strong opinions about, and ruins it, there's no conspiracy involved. Now, mind you, this happens more frequently with, like, bars and restaurants and things than with multi-billion-dollar social networks.
- Zigurd 3y ago
  Not mutually exclusive. Incompetence and authoritarianism are compatible.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    and often quite common

codingdave 3y ago

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

mandmandam 3y ago
You think the richest man in the world, along with his ultra-wealthy Saudi and mega-Zionist backers, are genuinely championing free speech as Musk so often claims? Puh-lease. The simplest explanation here is malice. Otherwise you have to believe that the wealthiest people in the world, experienced business people with the world's best paid advisors, are destroying Twitter through sheer business incompetence. I don't buy it for a second and I'm shocked that people really believe this is just simple stupidity. Attributing the destructive actions of well-known gaslighting lying billionaires to stupidity is honestly one of the weirdest things I can imagine. Sure, they make mistakes - but repeatedly, over and over, for years, and only with this one company? ... Nah.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Wouldn't it have been more effective for him to have just closed it on day one? Why leave it around for years, and have 75% of the users still there? That's being pretty incompetent at destroying it.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    The same reason that when a military force used to seize radio stations and telephone exchanges, it took them over rather than demolishing them.
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    There's a word for this: "Plausible deniability". Overly blatant actions like that have a tendency to rile people up to tipping points. Then there's the money - closing it day 1 leaves money on the table. There's the ego. Even Musk fan boys would have a hard time swallowing the wilful destruction of a beloved (and expensive) site. For those and other reasons (anigbrowl hit the nail on the head!), it's far easier to just gut all the parts that made the platform a threat to the mega-yacht class.
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      > There's a word for this: "Plausible deniability". There's a word for _this_: "self-sealing" [0]. A believer in a conspiracy theory, when presented with evidence contrary to the conspiracy theory, will often "reinterpret it as originating from the conspiracy" [1], or otherwise treat it "as further evidence for the conspiracy" [1]. The simplest explanation for elmu acting like an uninformed, out-of-touch narcissist is that is who he is. Many narcissists genuinely believe they are pro-free-speech even while they attack speech they dislike. Toss him on the pile. 0: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585 1: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scholcom/246/ https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scholcom/246/
      - krapp 3y ago
        At this point it's pretty clear that when Elon Musk talks about "free speech" he means the freedom to spread right-wing speech without consequence. I honestly believe a lot of what he's doing is, in his mind, liberating the site from the "woke mind virus" he believes turned his daughter trans. Most of the rest is boredom, because I also don't believe he really cares about the platform. He didn't even really want it, but he's stuck with it, so he's mostly just screwing around. If you interrogate Musk's action from the point of view of the bored, redpilled sociopath behind the mask of a brilliant entrepreneur playboy genius engineer, a lot of his decisions make sense.
- Moomoomoo309 3y ago
  "Only with this one company" is quite the statement on its own. Elon's blunders are numerous and across most of his companies, they are not limited to Twitter.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  ... I mean, the Saudis, and the likes of Ellison, invest in dumb shit all the time! Like, Ellison invested in Theranos. He has a track record in investing in nonsense. (I don't understand how Theranos wasn't more damaging to the "rich people are magical super genius investors" meme common on here, but here we are.) > experienced business people with the world's best paid advisors All the advisors in the world are no use if you don't listen to them because you think you know better.
anigbrowl 3y ago
That's a good maxim, but when all the behavior points in the same direction it becomes facile to cling to it. A stupid person's decisions wouldn't be so consistent.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  debatable. many morons are entirely predictable; sometimes you only have one or two cards to play.

k12sosse 3y ago

.. don't forget refusing to engage with any press and automating a pooh emoji as an autoreply

chrisjc 3y ago
Though it certainly takes care of the usual "We reached out to ???, but they didn't respond" statement.

deeg 3y ago

I am absolutely sure it's not deliberate because Musk renamed it to x.com. He's been looking to use that name for years and he wouldn't have renamed Twitter if he was planning on destroying it. No, I think it's easier to say that a billionaire who surrounds himself with sycophants and ketamine end up making a lot of stupid mistakes.

fragmede 3y ago
I don't know if that's true. In order to be sure, we'd need to have a billionaire surrounded by just sycophants, and then just ketamine, and finally one surrounded by neither, and see how they fare. Really, to be sure, we'd want to have a large dataset, so we need a whole bunch of billionaires to take part in this experiment. Of course, finding willing billionaires will be hard, so instead we'll need to create some willing billionaires for this to happen. I volunteer to be one of them, so I'll just need a $1,000,000,000 dollars for my part in this experiment. (And maybe syncophants and ketamine, depending on which group we want me to be a part of.) Will you help fund it? It's for science.
- krapp 3y ago
  This is Hacker News. Best we can do is millionaires tweaked out on Red Bull and adderall.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  this sounds like GPT nonsense written to defend billionaires and deflect the discussion. that wealthy and powerful people have sycophants and live in their own universes is heavy documented throughout history, in various cultures and countries -- Ming Emperors, Roman Caesars, Incan Kings, etc.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Lol your GPT detector is off. What would you even feed ChatGPT to get to make a joke like that?

rsynnott 3y ago

I mean, maybe it's a grand conspiracy, but Occam's Razor says it's more likely to just be incompetence. Generally when a rich idiot buys a business they don't understand but have strong opinions about, and ruins it, there's no conspiracy involved. Now, mind you, this happens more frequently with, like, bars and restaurants and things than with multi-billion-dollar social networks.

Zigurd 3y ago
Not mutually exclusive. Incompetence and authoritarianism are compatible.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  and often quite common