Really hard to imagine the richest and most accomplished dude on the planet not being able to secure funding. Somehow people still think he’s just a showman. At some point in time, accomplishments can’t be explained away
It is also a simplification to highlight his achievements without also acknowledging that he doesn’t seem to be a very moral or stable person. Some of the criticism of his behavior is clearly sour grapes that he doesn’t act “properly” for a billionaire, but there are also many examples of him being a bad person a la Steve Jobs.
We tolerate the characteristics because of the perceived value, but it would also be nice to highlight genuinely good people with significant accomplishments for being successful as well as kind.
How is he 'unstable' exactly? He has been leading successful companies for 30 years and pretty much every company he has been involved in has been highly successful. He has never been unstable, just opinionated. And people don't like that so they call him psychologically unstable instead.
What he has done that is bad and why people hate him:
- Called somebody something bad on twitter once.
- Twits dumb memes with dumb humor sometimes
- Twitted about cryptocurrencies. People claim this is market manipulation to enrich himself without any evidence.
- Twitter 'Funding secured'. People believe this is made up, however it was conclusively settled. And even if it was not fully secured, there is little question he could have found the money. So not sure why people are so angry about that.
That seems to be most of the criticism I read. If that is the worst thing, I don't know what people are so worked up about.
Some leftists are angry he doesn't support unions, but of course almost no rich person (and many non rich people don't either).
I assume you're talking about the time he called a diver (and actual hero) a pedophile. It went a bit further than that - he hired a private investigator who tried (and failed) to dig up dirt on the man.
The people calling the diver a "hero" are just as odd. Since when do we go around calling people "heroes" in this day and age? The only people who should be using that term are those who were personally saved by someone. Further the guy didn't actually take part in the rescue himself. He was a hobbyist diver who lived in the area who was an advisor. The "heroes", if there are any, are the actual rescuers who are almost forgotten to history now because everyone remembers the guy Musk called a name more than the people who did the actual rescuing.
The diver was not a hero. He was an somebody that himself did little, and pushed himself into the media where he actually started insulting Musk and his team.
He created a false narrative about what Musk and his team of engineers (literal rocket engineers) were doing. Musk and his engineers had coordinated with the actual rescue team and the Mini-Sub they build was according to specification from the diving team who suggested they were not sure if the youngest and smallest child could be rescued with the conventional method they were planning.
The media of course presented this as Musk comes in and advocates for his own method of saving everybody and the 'hero' was a guy who pushed himself into the cheap sensationalist media by attacking Musk. The sensationalist media of course simply ran with that and were just to happy to publish anything negative about Musk.
That was of course during a time when Tesla was having challenges scaling and the 'Musk is a total idiot' storyline was getting lots of clicks.
In all, sure, Musk did something stupid but he didn't start it. He had never said anything bad about either this guy or the diving team. He had in fact done the opposite and expressed that it was good that their alternative solution in the end wasn't required.
But I guess anybody who pushes himself into the media who to insult Musk must be a hero.
Both of you guys who have responded to my comment have been rampaging through this thread with aggressive defenses of Musk. This is not normal behaviour.
If you don't want to consider a man who was instrumental in saving the lives of 12 boys a hero that's fine, there are lots of other adjectives that I'm sure you can find and they're all far more flattering than the one Musk made of himself in that saga.
Take a step back and think about what you're defending here. It's not a good look.
You call it aggressive, I just responding with happened rather then what the cheap clickbait media outlets who provided form this crisis wanted to claim happened.
> instrumental
There was a professional diving team that saved the children he was not himself doing it.
And even if he was pushing yourself into the media and making headlines by insulting somebody who tried to help is not really a good look. Specially because it was not constitutive (or respectful) critism. It was simply a guy who wanted attention and got it.
> Take a step back and think about what you're defending here. It's not a good look.
I'm not defending what Musk said. It was clearly a stupid thing to say.
But if the main critism of a guy who lead 2 important technology companies for decades is 'he got too angry at somebody who insulted him in the media' then that is a pretty lame reason to hate him so much.
Calling somebody a pedo because they insulted your work on TV is unstable behaviour. So is repeating the claim to journalists and saying explicitly you really literally meant it, throwing more insults in, settling the libel case and then repeating the claims again. Actually, unstable is one of the nicest adjectives you could use about this abhorrent behaviour.
Your defences and explanations are all irrelevant and rely on minimising it as "saying something bad" and "on Twitter". That isn't adding anything to the conversation.
I coyld provide a long list of blockbuster movies about live saving heros. All of which just did their jobs, under dangerous conditions. Yes, you can be a hero if just do your job. And yes, we all accept that.
That being said, it was never Elons job to help, nor was it his job to develop a non-working submarine for the task. Or to be insulted when someone stated so. He did it for the PR and the fame, when he got neither was pissed and started insulting and harassing people.
He makes everyone playing at performative ‘seriuz buzniss’ look unserious by juxtaposition, especially since he got the highest $core in their main game.
> Some of the criticism of his behavior is clearly sour grapes that he doesn’t act “properly” for a billionaire, but there are also many examples of him being a bad person a la Steve Jobs.
If we can get a massively successful revolutionary business like SpaceX without someone like Steve Jobs I'd love it. But so far the sample size is small and there aren't any countering examples. History has thus far shown that you need people with strong personality and drive with some amount of lack of empathy in order to create massive shifts in the course of humanity.
SpaceX is impressive, no doubt about that. But all we got from it so far is, maybe, cheaper orbital launches. Even without SpaceX we would get stuff into space, we did before already so.
It's also galvanized an entire industry that was basically completely stagnant before SpaceX. The number of space-related and space-adjacent startups is skyrocketing. People figured out, because of SpaceX, that you can actually make a profitable business out of space that isn't just government contracts.
People figured out that, if you manage to pull of a Musk impression, investors are willing to part with shit tons of money for space start ups. Whether any of those will work out or not is still not answered. Nor is the question if there is enough actual demand for all those small payload launches, SpaceX is launching their own Starlink satellites (and may well dump that business on retail investors) and if the other businesses currently paying for those small payload launches are themselves profitable isn't sure neither.
I'm not talking about launch companies. I'm talking about all the other space companies, many of which you probably haven't heard of. SpaceX has enabled an entire new generation of startups that are making use of cheaper launch costs.
To be fair - it’s more about twitter than musk. Twitter just isn’t the best social media platform out there in terms of financial performance, and they also don’t have the ability to take too much debt, making the financing even more challenging bc it can be a pretty risky asset. Still tho, the financing is complex. It will be interesting if Musk (read: Morgan Stanley) can actually pull it off.
He’s not just a showman, but he is a showman. And it’s not like you have to dig back into ancient history to find instances where he invented a bid like this, he basically made up a bid for Tesla a few years ago and lied about having secured financing.
Yeah that's why there is such a long history of showman starting successful rocket company and other successful high capital businesses.
Musk has never admired to having made up the funding. He settled the dispute because it lead to problems with Tesla credit rating, banks didn't want an outstanding dispute with SEC.
A judge recently said he was a liar and it was so far beyond dispute that a jury would not be allowed to decide for themselves, as they might be influenced by Musk's ongoing public BSing such as with the TED talk.
So, no, informed people are not "casually" calling him a liar.
"Judge in Musk trial will tell jury that “Funding secured” tweets were false"
and
"[T]hough 'jury instructions are often an ineffective remedy,' the Court finds that unlikely to be true for the instant case where the jury will be told that the Court has already found that the August 2018 tweets were false and made with the requisite scienter [knowledge of wrongdoing]," Chen wrote.
It’s much worse than that. I had previously assumed Musk knew what he was doing and was fooling around on Twitter in an effort to (unethically) crush short sellers. Now it appears like he’s an utterly inept businessman who took the first verbal sign of interest, rushed it to Twitter as though the deal was complete, and then blew up the deal in a hissy fit.
I still think what he’s done at SpaceX and Tesla is admirable, but after reading those emails I’m definitely a few percent less confident that there will still be a Tesla to service my Model 3 in the future.
He's not an inept businessman. He's someone with aspergers who takes someone at face value at all times. If someone says something is the case he believes them. He doesn't handle being deceived well nor does he know when it's happening.
And actually he's not a "businessman" at all. He's an engineer at heart. "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.
Oh, I know some of those self-appoined chief engineers (cool title, I get it, one should earn it so). They almost drove the comoany into the ground. And they never shipped anything in their whole lives neither.
EDIT: And they think they are Musk as well. Without the same ability to raise money that's incredible dangerous so.
I'm not really trying to make a strong case. I'm just a little disappointed when people say "He has not built anything".
Isn't that a little mean, and elitist?
No person is perfect. And Elon Musk certainly has flaws. But saying he's not built anything about someone playing a crucial role in 3+ huge companies just feels wrong.
If we compare him to the CEO's of the other Fortune 50 companies, he seems like one of the most engineering-minded.
I'm not sure "elitist" is the right word for criticizing the wealthiest man on Earth's habit of portraying himself as a genius rocket surgeon.
I'm not saying he's never written a line of code. I'm saying he's vastly exaggerating his contributions to the technologies he is known for and his only "engineering" credentials are unspecified contributions to a dot com boom software company that repurposed an existing navigation database for its USP while essentially selling web listings to companies.
When people hear Musk is an "engineer" I doubt they're thinking of someone probably just writing some HTML2.0 pages and CGI Perl scripts, if that. It's also important to keep in mind that the history of Zip2 is scantly documented beyond "the brothers Musk founded it and then sold it for millions some years later" so we don't even know if Elon wrote even a single line of code or whether he meaningfully contributed to the software at all.
Even if we're exceptionally credulous and believe he wrote all of Zip2 himself, that makes him a programmer, not an engineer in the sense it is implied when talking about his involvement in Tesla or SpaceX. Knowing how to build physical machines is very different from knowing how to write software, and I say that as a seasoned software dev.
> He's someone with aspergers who takes someone at face value at all times. He doesn't handle being deceived well nor does he know when it's happening.
> "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.
This exact nonsense is why the autistic community was so displeased when he made a big show of having "asperger's" (which in the US under DSM-V is just autism, btw). Can we please stop justifying toxic and reckless behavior with "oh but they're autistic" as if we're talking about naive children not grown adults?
Autistics tend to struggle with ambiguity and social cues, yes, but many of us are even more sensitive to social cues than allistics because we literally had to learn to pick up on this shit to survive. A lot of autistics report actually being hyper-empathetic to the point where it can be debilitating because it's hard to filter out the noise and determine which cues you're supposed to pick up on and which ones you're supposed to ignore.
Elon Musk is a dickhead AND autistic. He's not a dickhead because he's autistic. He's naive because he got extremely lucky (like all billionaires do, even if it's only winning the lottery of being born into wealthy families with ample of business opportunities) and overestimates his own intelligence (which isn't helped by his massive fanbase thinking he's the best thing since sliced bread because he bought and funded some companies developing tech he thought was cool), not because he's autistic.
> This exact nonsense is why the autistic community was so displeased when he made a big show of having "asperger's" (which in the US under DSM-V is just autism, btw). Can we please stop justifying toxic and reckless behavior with "oh but they're autistic" as if we're talking about naive children not grown adults?
There's no such thing as "the autistic community" (though I won't deny some people may self-proclaim themselves as part of some non-existent community) and I'm not justifying anything by what I said. It's just how he thinks.
And I, as an autist, am telling you that this is a farcical caricature that is routinely used to excuse shitty behavior and at the same time deny us autonomy.
I don't see how my opinion of the reasons someone else's behavior denies you autonomy in any way. Also I probably have aspergers (at least a lot of other people including family members have told me I seem like I have it but I've never been diagnosed) and his behavior is very understandable from my point of view.
Which new markets, after paypal? Cars? Rockets that go into space? Solar on roofs? Things carrying people through tunnels?
And in all the successful cases he had massive contributions by others. He provided the money, which is huge in itself. The actual work eas done by others, and the fact the Musk fails to properly say so, and that his fanboys believe every single of his claims, truely makes him the Steve Jobs of 2020s we deserve.
> The actual work eas done by others, and the fact the Musk fails to properly say so
This is not true. He often mentions and emphasizes that the success is the work of his great teams. He also publicly acknowledged that he failed to do so in the past, but he is certainly doing it now.
>Which new markets, after paypal? Cars? Rockets that go into space?
Yes and yes
>The actual work eas done by others, and the fact the Musk fails to properly say so,
Give me one instance where Musk denies the work of his friends and colleagues at SpaceX and Tesla please, because this post reek of bad sentiment and an awful take.
I never said he denies it, did I? I sadi, quote, "and the fact the Musk fails to properly say so". To elaborate, Musk takes all the line light in the public for himself, he gets all the hype. Shotwell gets a little bit of it, and that's it then.
Boeing probably has more and better engineers than SpaceX. Same with Toyota/Volkswagen compared to Tesla. Yet these companies simply cannot innovate. Talent (ability to do good work) is pointless without good leadership.
Toyota pioneered hybrid vehicles, Boeing got us the first composite fuselage for commercial airliners. I call that innovation. VW is pushing heavily towards EVs, and those actually are in the price range Tesla fails to achieve for its Model 3.
It is a different kind of innovation so, only considering "disruptuon" as innovation is quite short sighted so. Espiecially since Christensen himself differentiates between disruptive and sustaining (?) innovation.
Is Boeing in space with SpaceX?
Would VW even care about EVs without Tesla? Would they lie about them like they did their diesel emissions? lol - holding up VW as something to emulate!
GM had a pretty good EV in the 80’s - then killed it. Literally - never sold them, only leased them and forced owners to cough them back up and destroyed them.
I have zero interest in owning a Tesla - their stance on right to repair and their customer service sucks, but without them there wouldn’t be near the activity around EVs as there is now. Like him or not, Elon pretty much single handedly embarrassed the rest of the auto industry to have to take EVs seriously by proving that yes, EVs can be not only useful but cool.
SpaceX isn't the only company shooting stuff into orbit. And VW isn't the only manufacturer pushing into EVss. I used those two because the were braught by OP.
And VW and others would care about EVs because of the general awareness about climate change.
> You just called the most successful businessman in the world an 'utterly inept businessman'.
Success is measured using market share not market cap or net worth of the CEO.
Tesla accounted for 1.3% of all cars sold in the world during 2021.
Stock price, net worth and number of synchopants getting on their knees are like a voting machine, market share is a weighting machine.
When you use the right metric it becomes crystal clear who are te guys setting records at the weighting machine.
It's the usual quiet ones: Buffett, Gates, Brin&Page, Tim Cook.
Not to mention the GOAT. Rockefeller left Standard Oil at #1 in market share and here we are in 2022 the companies which were under the umbrella of Standard Oil are still at #1.
No you can't blithely choose which measure of success - it actually doesn't have a single measure.
Your measure of market share is a reasonable one, as are the two I proposed being profit and creating and succeeding in entirely new markets.
They are new markets too, it's not rockets, it's reusable rockets at incredibly lower cost to orbit and new capacities to previous ones, it's space based communication networks that are again a serious generational leap ahead of whatever was before, it's the emergence of a serious replacement for ICE vehicles. In all these markets, his companies are the only market share! He owns these markets, because he created them, and is multiple years ahead of the rest of the world's highly motivated competitors.
I'm not detracting from the successes of the other guys you mentioned. But Musk can very reasonably be called the world's most successful businessman at the moment on multiple metrics.
It might be a competition between Musk and others, but it's the opposite utterly inept, which was the point - trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the OP per HN guidelines, while also keeping the discussion grounded in rational sanity.
All the stuff you mentioned brings zero benefits to the consumer. The consumer wants a steady improvement in their quality of life in the next 3 months or less, and then you go from there hopefully adding one more bit in the next 3 months and so on.
There is a reason why Musk BS doesn't find fertile ground in NYC and his cult is largely based in California. Quartely (4 * 3 = 12) reports were adopted because people want to have a clear understanding of how a public company is improving the American consumer's quality of life, and they want it every 3 months.
Tesla accounted for 1.3% of all cars sold in the world in 2021, these are rich people toys we are talking about. 1.3% in 20 years.
> He owns these markets, because he created them
Cars are cars, EV, hybrid, gasoline, diesel...whatever. If you are in the business of making cars the relevance of your company should be judged based on what's you market share in car manufacturing compared against everybody who are also in the business of making cars.
Mr. Musk took 20 years to get to 1.3%. That's 80 Quarters. 1.3% / 80 = 0.01625% per quarter. What are we even talking about...
By this time around the govt. was already threatning Gates and Rockefeller to put them in jail because they had 95% market share of Operative Systems and oil respectively.
I am genuinely interested to hear your reasoning for how someone can be an "utterly inept businessman" and also become the richest man in the world. How is that possible?
What I've read is that they did not discuss numbers. People start from the assumption that rich people can get away with any kind of BS, but usually that doesn't apply amongst themselves. As the richest person in the world, perhaps Musk feels like he's a class unto himself, but others disagree.
You can just compare the current situation.
This time, he got letters from people with money saying he can have it, and on what basis. Now that we see it, isn't it obvious that is what "funding secured" means, even if we don't all know exactly how high finance works?
"Funding secured" wasn't a half-truth, it was an outright lie that sounded a little like a half truth. Very Trumpian.
Also, it's recently been reported that a judge declared the question of whether "funding secured" was a knowing lie closed, in the sense that the jury in related ongoing litigation will be told that it's not up to them to decide that point.
Sounds to me like it was a lie. August 10th is two days after Musk tweeted out "funding secured". And all they agree to saying is: "Therefore, as discussed, we would like our teams to start working together in a confidential manner to explore a potential transaction".
He's never been a showman. It's a ridiculous internet myth that thinks that he is. Anyone who says he's a showman really has no understanding of the guy and hasn't looked at what he's said outside of the stuff he's put on twitter. Listen to his speeches, and not the one where it's some bland interviewer that constantly interrupts him.
Even though there's a bunch of people (including Carmack) that claim that he's a great engineer, it's really hard to believe when he's put out stuff like this. Like, did he use up all of his thinking fuel on designing rockets that he didn't understand why the boring company's mission was a total non-starter?
A CNN 2 minute video chopping up what he says to make it sound more grand is not him being a "showman". It's called video editing. You can tell the video has been HIGHLY edited because it's not how he talks.
> it's really hard to believe when he's put out stuff like this.
> Like, did he use up all of his thinking fuel on designing rockets that he didn't understand why the boring company's mission was a total non-starter?
He doesn't spend a lot of time working on the boring company to be frank. It's a small side project. He's doing it to see if it's possible.
The point is, building tunnels underground for personal transport vehicles as a "solution" to traffic is a terrible idea, and something only a showman can sell. Even if he has an awkward 2 hour speech about it, he succeeded as a showman because Vegas funded this terrible idea (just look how it ended up).
> The point is, building tunnels underground for personal transport vehicles as a "solution" to traffic is a terrible idea, and something only a showman can sell.
The fundamental point of boring company is to reduce the cost of underground boring. Shoving cars through tunnels is a means to an end of reducing the cost of underground boring. It's about finding a path to make some kind, any kind, of money off of boring in order to make the product development costs self-feeding. This is why the idea of cars driving through the tunnels was done rather than the original idea of putting cars on platforms through the tunnels. Cheaper and faster to market.
Musk started boring company with the idea that transportation needs to be 3 dimensional, and not just adding another single layer of transport under the ground (trains/subways), but having a whole ton of layers going deeper and deeper into the ground. Now they've done their first iteration of tunnel, which is quite bad, rinse and repeat until it gets cheaper.
BTW, Musk has never come out against subways, his point was just that in the US, people drive into cities in cars, so if they're using cars, then the transport system in the city needs to handle cars in a three dimensional way.
Even if nothing else, a boring tunnel could be used for “remote parking garages” and if the tunnel robot takes your car ten miles away to store it what would you care as long as it was available when needed?
There are differences. I don't know if the idea will actually work but here is what I understand of it. Use an analogy of cities as computer chips/networks.
1. He wants to move roads to 3d just like computer chips are 3d. This should increase bandwidth.
2. He wants to packet switch the system instead of batch. This should lower latency.
3. For the first two to work, you need to greatly reduce the cost/speed to construct them. Think Moore's law.
4. One way to do this is to speed up the boring machines.
5. Another way is to lower the additional necessary equipment. Tunnels carrying internal combustion cars need air circulation lest people die from carbon monoxide poisoning/ lack of oxygen. EVs don't need that.
6. Smaller tunnels are much faster to construct so constructing one for a subway would be much slower than one for EVs.
Arguments against this can either attack the premise that cities are necessary (remote work), that bigger cities are necessary (why not have smaller cities), that existing or other transportation can handle it better, or one or more of the above chains of thought are flawed.
This line of thinking is also found in his latest factories where the line is just a line of cars moved by carriers that aren't physically anchored to the floor). He makes an analogy of factories as computer chips.
>Moving transportation underground is such revolutionary idea that it exists for a century by now.
You ignored the essential part of his well written and detailed explanation - its not about the fact that its underground, but the cost of creating underground pathways, for cars or whatever. It saddens me that bad posts like yours infect HN.
It saddens me tgat at HN people start to blindly believe certain people's claims without checking precendce. In Musks case based on, IMHO, pure hype and his celebrity status. So I guess, same?
> In Musks case based on, IMHO, pure hype and his celebrity status
Or his proven track record of creating groundbreaking companies such as SpaceX and Tesla, which has made him the worlds richest man and why we are talking about him right now? Jeez
It's not intended as a solution to traffic congestion. It is intended to give local politicians new talking points to delay any large scale investments in public transportation.
Who knows how we'll solve transport in the future? Maybe we'll all be in personal cars underground and any massive investments in rail will be for nothing?
It's a variant of the general idea of pushing things like elevated monorails that you know are so expensive they won't be built in the near future. Or, indeed, very low pressure tube transportation systems.
Car companies have done this type of lobbying work since forever. Just as the oil companies when they push for more production, but since all oil will be biofuel in the future, in the end it will be a net positive for the environment.
Talk is cheap. Stock market is the place to test convictions. Pretty sure most of those people didn’t have skin in the game, long or short, either ways
All of those things existed before Musk. Is he retroactively giving himself credit for those things like he did with Tesla?
EVs are over a century old. SpaceX was recreating NASA research. Subways have been a thing for over a century; literally millions of people use them every day. Paypal's tech stack used Thiel's startup's technology; they jettisoned everything from Musk's stack and moreover fired him for gross incompetence.
But not an economic success and there was (and still is to be frank) no successful EV industry besides Tesla. A lot of fanfare with little results.
> SpaceX was recreating NASA research.
NASA and competitors dismissed any idea of landing rockets or even reusability in the first place. It was deemed a failed idea. This is why the SLS has been created by NASA as reusability was deemed a failure.
On the other items besides PayPal, they aren't successes yet so I'll reserve judgement.
On the whole "jettisoned" stuff there's a lot of conflicting reports on that and he wasn't fired.
Reading such an absurd and idiotic reductionist take on HN just makes me sad. I mostly speaks to you having absolutely zero knowlage about space technology and rocketry.
> moreover fired him for gross incompetence.
They fired him because he had a 10 year business plan to replace banks and become the main monetary system for all payments. A combination of being a bank, an online payment provider and Apple pay.
The other founders wanted to sell the company and make quick cash.
> Subways have been a thing for over a century;
Yeah such an asshole wanting to improve tunneling technology. Only assholes try to improve technology. We should just shoot anybody in the head who tries to improve on technology that is more then 10 years old.
The first rockets landed in the 70s, so yeah the tech existed already long ago. It wasn't used because rockets (e.g. Ariane 5) were developed to carry shuttle crat and nobody believed there were enough launches to make reusable rockets worthwhile. There are no shuttles anymore, and whether or not the launch market is big enough isn't sure yet neither.
I'm saying he accomplished something in these fields.
If you want to pull him down among the rest of us, why don't you just point out that he's inhaling and exhaling in exactly the same way as everyone else?
In other news: honeybee tongue hairs repel water
Pssh, oil repelled water way before honey bees, they're not that special!
No one on the planet at the time was as wealthy as the current crop of ultra-rich, including Musk. Perhaps no one in all of history, really, though that becomes a complicated comparison really fast.
But yes, he absolutely comes from wealth. Just like most of them do.
John D. Rockefeller was at the peak of his wealth in 1909, with over $900 million (in 1909 dollars). Doesn’t sound like much today—just your run-of-the-mill almost-billionaire. But that fortune represented about 5% of the TOTAL GDP of the U.S. in about 1910. That is obscenely GARGANTUAN.
If we were to translate 5% of the 2020 U.S. GDP today, that would be 5% of $20.807 trillion. Or about $1.404 trillion. So Bezos, with his $182.2 billion and Musk with his $264.6 billion, have A LONG way to go to catch up with Rockefeller.
This smells like the virulent detraction aimed at Trump, which a very large number of people tried to promulgate on social media. Sure, you can quote a bunch of subjective measures and conclude that he’s “stupid,” but he’s successful by every common understanding of the word. Trying to take a dump on him like this just comes off as jealousy.
Trump's companies failed at selling steaks, booze, and gambling to Americans. (He also failed at launching a coup d'etat, but at least he succeeded at avoiding punishment for it.)
Musk's companies have already revolutionized at least two hard-to-crack industries, aerospace and automotive, and are attempting more.
Your exercise in false equivalence is, well, an exercise in false equivalence.
He’s the chief engineer and product designer at Tesla, and the chief engineer at SpaceX, as well as CEO of both. He led the design and engineering of rockets that land, cutting the cost of space travel by one order of magnitude. Meanwhile he created the most valuable car maker in the world and forced the rest of the industry to bring forward their electric car plans by a decade. And these things weren’t accidents, he often tells the world what his goals are before accomplishing them. And he’s the richest man in the world. He’s many things, but not unaccomplished.
He owns the companies. He can call himself whatever he wants - doesn't make it true. He got lucky with Tesla - good timing, a pliant customer base willing to ignore all the things Tesla got wrong but still was willing to spend untold amount of money.
I am entirely skeptical he designed anything and considering the duds he's pretending are revolutionary (Boring, Hyperloop, Mars nonsense, Cybertruck, etc) but instead are failures it seems unlikely he could be so right about one thing and so wrong on others.
What a dumb ass comment. As if it was easy to start and lead major technology companies for decades.
Even if you want to go with the idiotic 'he is not an engineer'-storyline to make yourself feel good, as a business man his credentials are literally unassailable.
To downplay business success as 'hired some smart people' is just ridiculous and utterly sad and depressing to read on a page that is hosted on 'ycombinator'. Get a grip and think before you write something.
How did he get that much money and how did he end up in a position to hire so many people? These questions are important because majority of people cannot do that.
> Really hard to imagine the richest and most accomplished dude on the planet not being able to secure funding.
You don’t have to imagine. It literally already happened once when he claimed he had funding secured to take Tesla private.
As such, if you can’t imagine him not having funding secured this time, you’re severely lacking in imagination.
In his latest TED interview [0], Musk said that he had the funding secured for that Tesla private offering. He said that he needed to settle with the SEC so that they wouldn't freeze Tesla's bank accounts, and as part of the settlement he needed to publicly say that he hadn't secured funding.
That sounds super dubious, the SEC forced him to publicly lie in a settlement? Sorry, I am not buying it. You would have to put at least a dozen SEC lawyers on suicide watch after such a deal. And not only did they force him to lie in a settlement, now he suddenly breaks what he agreed to in that settlement without any consequences, so what was that settlement worth to begin with.
Yes, it sounds plausible, because if Tesla is threatened by certain SEC sanctions or legal troubles, banks could withdraw funding or raise interest rates on Tesla's debt, which would bankrupt the company. Or insurance companies could raise premiums or refuse to insure the company which again - could lead to catastrophe.
This is what Elon is saying and it sounds like a perfectly plausible scenario, under which you'd rather avoid the conflict and just shut up and sign and pay the fine.
It sounds plausible to you that SEC lawyers drew up a settlement that forced Musk to lie publicly about the funding situation of taking TSLA private? This would open up that lawyer for all sorts of criminal and private lawsuits and that poor guy doesn't even have anything personally to gain from forcing Musk to lie. Sorry, those are ludicrous allegations.
The SEC isn't forcing anything, as such, but public information about being investigated for something like this, in a public company, might well affect the market's willingness to lend to you.
Musk has also said he is going to launch legal action on this. Because that's almost exactly what happened, and it is unfair. So you are correct, and this saga probably still has more to go.
What's funny is almost anyone on the planet couldn't go up against someone like the SEC, which is why they can get away with this. Good on Musk for doing it.
This discussion shows how far Musk's anti-SEC propaganda had taken effect. As far as I know (I could be mistaken, and too lazy to investigate that further), but the SEC doesn't have the power to block bank accounts of companies over illegal things shareholders or officers of the company did.
That's how this discussion started: The SEC blackmailed Musk into signing a settlement or otherwise the SEC would block Tesla's accounts. Well, it's either that or Musk, in fact, did lie about the funding to take Tesla private. reasonable people believe the latter, other prefer option one. And then people still wonder were Tesla's evaluation comes from.
How did bank accounts come into this? There was never any discussion about bank accounts.
It's about financing of Tesla's debt. That's something that banks do, and banks could deny funding (even of a bank overdraft) for almost any reason really, like an SEC lawsuit.
No-one ever talked about any bank account being blocked. But in a world of debt, where debt is provided by institutions, if you can control who gets loans, you can control a lot.
>> In his latest TED interview [0], Musk said that he had the funding secured for that Tesla private offering. He said that he needed to settle with the SEC so that they wouldn't freeze Tesla's bank accounts, and as part of the settlement he needed to publicly say that he hadn't secured funding.
Citing from like three levels of comment up-stream.
No, the banks forced him to settle. It wasn't the SEC. Watch the video.
The banks didn't want a liability. The SEC disagreement was going to take too much time to resolve legitimately. If he didn't please the banks they wouldn't give him funding.
He literally has like 5x the market cap of Twitter in net worth. Yeah, that makes it pretty hard to imagine that he couldn't secure funding. Not really the same as the Tesla tweet.
No, just the most famous braggart. Other people, i.e. actual experts and professionals, did all the actual work that he likes to lay claim to accomplishing.
The problem with lending to him is most of his assets are TSLA shares. It's arguably absurdly overvalued as an automaker, and any effort to liquidate his position would be expensive since it would drive the price down. Someone did it, but I'm sure some people passed.
As someone else pointed out, TWTR isn't a great purchase, either. Its ad revenue isn't great, so if he defaults on the loan, the lender is stuck with an asset they don't want.
Was a similar loan among the reasons why a Tesla "bankrupcy" a couple of years ago wasn't that unlikely? It seems that the 203 $ are a reasonable valuation.
That would be a bit lower than Toyota's value. Toyota sold 10.5M vehicles last year. Tesla sold 930k. Yes, Tesla's growth is solid, but the valuation is because of the true believers. I avoid investing in anything Elon touches because valuations get weird.
> I've had rides in Model S's before and it was totally... fine? What made the Model 3 experience so much better than a conventional car?
I didn't actually say "better", but it was certainly a novel experience since I'd never been in an EV of any kind! The lack of engine noise coupled with the acceleration, somewhat mind-blowing.
I'm not convinced that any current EV - never mind any Tesla - is yet a good fit for a family such as ours, but I look forward to the day when there is such a choice of vehicle.
Tesla is a strategic asset for the US and for the West more generally speaking, even more so than SpaceX at this point, I personally don’t think it will be allowed to tank/go under.
I do agree that the stock is way over-valued when looking only at the economic fundamentals, but when one balances out the “the Chinese have all this battery thing all figured out!” vs “we only have Tesla on our side!” then things are different (and, yes, I know that the “Tesla batteries” are not 100% made by Tesla right now).
> Tesla is a strategic asset for the US and for the West more generally speaking
How so ? It's a car company, there are dozen of them making equally good, if not better, cars. Autopilot is useless and electric cars are already there. You can credit them for the democratisation of EV but that's about it
It’s not a car company, it’s a battery+software company with some wheels (literally) attached, hence part of the high valuation. It took me a while to realize this, had I put my money on this back then I would have had more money right now (10x times, I’d say).
The likes of Mercedes and VW are orders of magnitude behind, both when it comes to batteries and especially when it comes to software
Batteries are coming from Panasonic. Other OEMs have working EVs as well. And Tesla is way to small in terms of economic foot print that its disappearance would make a dent. Economics, not on the stock market.
Nothing about Tesla is strategic. SpaceX is different, sure. But with the exception of a yet-to-come lunar mission and astronaut trabsportation to the ISS the "West" got needed stuff into orbit just fine.
No other major car-maker has been able to come close to Tesla when it comes to the sleekness of their software and (especially that) when it comes to the cars' autonomy, Tesla is in a class of its own. And it's not for lack of trying, the Germans have already poured tens of billions of euros (at least) into the EV market.
Autonomous driving is totally unrelated to EVs, an ICE powered car can be as (non-)autonomous as an EV one. There was a nice thread recently about Mercedes liability regarding "autonomous" driving.
Well, that the "sleakness2 of software is a thing now when it comes to cars might make an Apple car difficult, the "sleek software" crowd is covered already. And there I was build quality, ride comfort and maintenance costs were also important when it comes to cars... Stupid me. But then I'm German, not sure if me driving French and old British cars offsets my ingrained sense of superiority of German car brands.
But yes, I agree Tesla is on its own in tremendously over selling its self driving tech.
> No other major car-maker has been able to come close to Tesla when it comes to the sleekness of their software and (especially that) when it comes to the cars' autonomy
Nobody cares about the software besides HN type people and the average user puts something like 40 miles per day on their car.
A far cry from "strategic asset" for the west, but you sure can program the car to make fart noises when you honk...
This is a very strong narrative making the rounds. Unfortunately it is not quite so. The batteries Tesla uses are a commodity - they are partnered with Panasonic and more recently the Chinese CATL (these guys do actual battery research, you know, with chemicals and lab coats).
Certainly packaging Panasonic rolls into 2170s gives them a nice edge but it isn't exactly rocket science.
The Giga press is made by the Italian Idra Group. They have bought them out at the moment but anybody can start nabbing them for themselves if they got a spare $30m laying around.
Tesla is certainly "good at engineering", but their advantage is not really in original IP so much as organizational agility. Perhaps the incumbents are too bureaucratic to adapt but I wouldn't count them out just yet.
Not a fanboy by any stretch, as I'm totally anti-EV (I find the regressive taxes supporting this industry quite repulsive, to be honest), I've written down just what I thought was happening/what the reality on the ground was.
> o much as organizational agility
That's why I insisted on the "better software" part, that's where much of their advantage comes from.
Maybe the Germans and the French can also source their batteries from the Chinese but they just haven't been able to put them to good use the way Tesla did (and does). For example right now Renault is selling a 20,000 euro EV (produced in China, of course) [1] which has atrocious autonomy, to say nothing of the fact that it feels very small. And that is supposed to be one of their main vehicles when it comes to targeting the EV mass-market, from one of the biggest car makers in the world. It's a complete joke.
tl;dr: It is excellent. In fact he says "coolest pickup truck ever made". People who were excited about the cyber truck and know cars would rather get this one.
> Maybe the Germans and the French can also source their batteries from the Chinese but they just haven't been able to put them to good use the way Tesla did (and does).
Well.. I don't know about the French. ;)
But Volkswagen will make you an electrified Golf just fine. And that is the best selling car in Europe. Toyota will make you a Yaris and a boring beige Prius.
The real test for Tesla will be F150 Lightning vs Cyber Truck sales. If Ford can show strong sales, it shows that a focused incumbent can fend off an upstart competitor, despite the upstart's first-mover advantage on the drivetrain. The other sign to look for will be if European carmakers can slow Tesla's growth in the low to mid-end luxury market.
The drivetrain is basically a commodity too, a much simpler component than an engine. Unlike with legacy vehicles people will be hard pressed to feel the difference.
Based on teardowns Tesla is innovating here but even if they have an edge it is a tiny one (single digit percentage) because of diminishing returns.
> it’s a battery+software company with some wheels (literally) attached
I remember WeWork being a software company, not a commercial landlord.
That said, I agree that Tesla's software is significantly better than every competitor, but Autopilot is behind the other self-driving players, and I'd rather have dials than a touchscreen, anyway.
There are definitely influential people who believe social media platforms are also strategic assets. The DOJ did try to expropriate US TikTok that one time
WhatsApp’s acquisition was (partly) intermediated by a boutique investment bank which had former CIA-director George Tenet on its board of directors (or something like that). I’m surprised the strategic aspect of a major part of US’s tech industry is not given much thought in here.
"Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Heartland America, you have just subsidized a bunch of millionaires living in California's most expensive coastal ZIP codes to the tune of $10,197 per car. I'm sure they are sending you a thank-you card."
It would be hilarious if it turns out that the government is interested in a private Twitter for "enhanced" data collection and analysis.
If the government wants to stimulate electric vehicles, those subsidies are incredibly well spent. Tesla popularised them and grew the market for them like nobody else has done.
Mr and Mrs Heartland America should be more concerned about the subsidies for oil companies; what are those meant to accomplish exactly?
It's still a huge gamble for him and his backers. Twitter while immensely important to the world in terms of reach -- it got Trump elected -- does not make money well... let's see what he does. I've come to terms with him buying it. I'll go elsewhere if it gets shitty.
I don't know of people saying that he had "no possible way" to finance a deal.
Quoting the excellent Matt Levine, the situation is more like the following: '''the answer to the question “might Elon Musk have made an offer to take a large public company private, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, without giving any real thought to where the money would come from?” is “absolutely yes, and he’s done it before.”'''
And that's not actually accurate. Even if you take the extreme interpretation of 'funding secured' he certainty didn't just wholesale make up the claim.
When all is said and done, this is likely to be a Thoma Bravo deal, not a Musk deal — too much OPM (and too much of Musk’s Tesla equity) is at stake to let Musk go all rabid ferret on the company. I’d expect him to get some high-profile and low-impact personal wins out of this (whatever those might be, since it’s still not clear to me what he actually wants out of this), TB tears the dev organization down to the studs to get opex under control, they spin it back to the market within a few years for a tidy profit, and the company collapses shortly thereafter, with its assets sold off to Red Ventures for a fraction of a cent on the dollar to serve as a lead-generator for prepaid mobile operators.
Of course they were wrong. Just like how they buy the stock AFTER the announcement hoping that it goes up, but instead it falls. [0] Typical.
Always be skeptical of what is widely reported on the news and don't blindly listen to what is being said by the brainless parrots on twitter re-tweeting everything that they think is 'going' to happen. Especially even if this deal goes through. As I said before. [1]
As always, not even the most upvoted or top comments are correct either. It's yet another bias projection.
I'm finding media coverage and opinions on trending news topics to be increasingly superficial and partisan. It has certainly always been the case to some degree, but as someone who does truly want to understand how things work and are, it's become more difficult to make sense of things. It seems like media entities feel they need to be entrenched on their side of the American culture war, and show no empathy/humility/curiosity or attempt to take a holistic view on issues.
The mainstream media takes on Musk and Twitter have certainly been something. For some reason, he's been coded as 'right wing' by many among the media set, and is getting the treatment that those coded that way get. The available evidence doesn't support that coding, and it all shouldn't matter anyway.
Anyone who doesn't fall in line and support the "current thing" is labeled a far-right extremist these days. Ironically, they do this even to people with traditionally liberal views like free speech being a good thing, like Elon in this case.
If the phrase is used to harass people in a targeted manner, then sure. Running a platform that excludes those who harass people is quite reasonable, and necessary if you want to keep those sweet advertising numbers up.
"Learn to code" was a critique of how journalists covered job losses in blue-collar industries, compared to how they covered job losses in journalism. Harassment has become a seriously devalued concept if people replying to a tweet unfavorably qualifies. When public figures make tweets, they aren't entitled to unanimous agreement and applause.
Because there's not much to be gained from "tuning" into a 24-hour news cycle, you're much better off reading news stories after several weeks IMO. The benefit to this is that complete pictures are more likely to be formed and you waste less time "chasing" false leads.
He hasn't financed the full amount and is still short. He'll have to unload Tesla shares to raise the balance; I'm very curious if he'll do that. Maybe in being overly cynical, but it feels like it may be the board calling his bluff rather than prolonging the process/having to find a white knight. I'm morbidly curious about what a private Twitter will look like in 2 years (both the company[1] and product)
It really depends on if he follows through on what he is proposing, which seems to be to allow for disinformation and hate speech. If that turns out to not be the case, then I might reconsider.
How can it be worse? If all Elon did was buy it, fire everyone and liquidate the assets it would be an improvement. Twitter as it stands today is a tool that is being used by nefarious actors to shape the narrative in the US. This is a fact. It's a massive gaslighting and astroturfing operation.
Oh, absolutely. The platform is overrun with bots. Here's an interesting exercise to try: search for a unique phrase on Twitter and see how many results you get that are posting verbatim copypasta from seemingly "unique" accounts, especially around popular trending topics. Detecting this should not be too difficult I imagine.
"generally bad and annoying" breaks whatever ideal of 'free speech' one might have. The most concrete thing Musk has said is "twitter should just follow the laws of countries", but spam bots are not illegal - USPS cannot unilaterally ban junk mail because that breaks the first amendment
Interviewer: You've described yourself, Elon, as a free speech absolutist, but does that mean that there's literally nothing that people can't say and it's okay?
Musk: Well, I think obviously Twitter or any forum is bound by the laws of the country that it operates in. So obviously there are some limitations on free speech in the US, and, of course, Twitter would have to abide by those rules. [...] No, I think, like I said, in my view Twitter should match the laws of the country
Quite a struggle for an international website, where the majority of users are outside of the US, to just say "we should follow the laws of countries" as if there's one single internationally compatible law for that.
How do you currently measure the amount of disinformation and hate speech on Twitter's platform? And how do you define those terms currently?
I can promise you, no matter what he does, people/sites you follow will likely extol how terrible the platform has gotten with disinformation/hate speech, even if he does nothing. How will you protect against that negativity bias? Do you have an objective way to know whether it's gotten worse or not, or are you going to rely on anecdotes from the sources you follow?
>If that turns out to not be the case, then I might reconsider.
It seems rather narcissistic to think that deleting your account would be of any consequence or inflict punishment on anyone. To put it bluntly, someone farting in their own car on the highway (and potentially soiling themselves, getting distracted, and causing a chain-reaction accident) has a greater potential impact to future events than whatever irrelevant drivel you (or I, or anyone) posts on Twitter.
One deleted account is nothing. Many deleted accounts changes the companies value and ability to profit from advertising. Netflix's current woes are not just about subscriber numbers but the numbers didn't have to go down much to make an impact & focus attention on their challenges.
That will never happen in sufficient volume to make any meaningful impact. I predict roughly the same amount of cancelled Twitter accounts as those that cancelled their Spotify accounts (and proudly announced doing so to their 8 followers on Twitter) after the whole Joe Rogan kerfuffle. Apparently Rogan gained 2M subscribers in the aftermath. [1]
For better or worse, Twitter has become the de-facto town square. The clones have tried and failed because the momentum to move sufficient numbers en masse just isn't there. Do you honestly believe that Musk is such an unpleasant figure that hoards of people would suddenly leave the platform? Where would they go? A digital Jonestown?
I don't know what will happen if Musk takes over but I've seen enough platforms disappear to know that their long term longevity is not something I'd bet real money on. Every collapsed empire at one time looked immortal.
People have boycotted bigger things over less. I think it's perfectly reasonable for someone to not want to support Musk and not buy their products or support a site they own (especially if you think they're going to make it worse).
Of course they can; after all, we have freedom of thought.
It's also as idiotic as all the people who were rage-tweeting their airline a week ago, upon suspension of the mask policy in the US, threatening to take their business elsewhere, only to have every major airline follow suit in the span of 6 hours.
I hope they enjoyed their bus ride, otherwise they'd have to just sit there and take it. I suppose getting your pilot's license isn't out of the question. It might be easier than building your own Twitter.
I think "not using twitter" is a very easy and casual thing anyone can, and probably should do, if they want to. It's not that deep. Just don't use the website everyone calls "the hell site"
> It really depends on if he follows through on what he is proposing, which seems to be to allow for disinformation and hate speech.
If you have to put a real, verified name behind these posts, at least that can cut into the massive bot armies spreading disinformation and the massive foreign spending that goes into amplifying all of it.
Then you would have the benefits of a free speech platform while preventing it from becoming a psunami of noise.
You have to stand behind what you say, because your real name is on it. True, we do have politicians and others trying to spin destructive narratives and spread falsehoods, but it is their right in the United States to do so, as long as it does not run awfoul of existing laws.
Requiring "Real Name" (and making it public) is an incredibly privileged position that immediately destroys the website for a significant amount of people.
Anonymity is very valuable, especially for some of societies' most vulnerable, who should have a place on social media.
The tone of these two comments is pretty amazing to me, on HN (not including dead comments). I don't see what the GP did to deserve such snide mockery.
The downvotes in response to my question seems to imply a lot of people think a Musk acquisition would be a good thing. Maybe list some of the reasons why?
Free speech, A truer town square to debate important issues, Remove bots, add new features, a fresh take on how to raise profits, better management, and he even mentioned building a homeless shelter in their HQ.
Twitter can be a pretty hostile place if you’re not a white straight man, can’t see Musk making it any betters for those people who are currently harrassed fir being women, queer or colored
It's more that your parent comment doesn't convey much information. I read it as "I don't think Musk acquiring twitter is a good thing" without explaining why and extrapolating that everyone else will feel the same way.
You know where I'm getting it. If I say: "could this be the worst presidency our country has seen?" It's clear that it's not a real question, but an assertion. Similarly, when someone says "could this be the end of Twitter?" they are suggesting that it is in fact the end of Twitter.
You're right that such a thing is common, but I don't get the "fake question" vibe at all - sincerely, I don't. Maybe the parent is committing that sin, for all I know, but to assume so seems unnecessarily hostile. It's not worded particularly provocatively, and the question of the direction Elon would take the platform and whether it could really be the beginning of the end, for some definition of end, has genuine value. Also, please don't accuse me of being dishonest with, "You know where I'm getting it".
Sorry for assuming bad faith. It sounded like you were playing dumb in which case I feel there's no other way to respond.
I feel that 'assume good faith' has its limits since those who comment in bad faith have no restrictions while others are forced to respond as though nothing is wrong. So sometimes I feel the need to respond a bit more aggressively, maybe that's not in the goals of the site though.
That seems like a very uncharitable interpretation. They weren't asking whether others agree with a statement of fact but whether a sentiment or feeling is common. Maybe it would have led to a more productive discussion if the question had been phrased more generally ("do people think there will be a lot of departures") without putting a personal spin on it, but the ugly turn things took afterward is more on the respondents than on the person asking. We're supposed to be curious, remember?
I think it is a little unfair for you to expect a good discussion when you line up no real reasons as to why you would be deleting your account other than you seemingly dislike Musk a lot.
I’m in the “fortunate” position to not have strong feelings about Musk either way. I may delete my Twitter account if he takes the company private, but that will be more of protest against billionaires owning platforms that I think should be non-profit organisations because of their public impact. That being said, I’m not sure how that is even relevant to most people here on HN as my “protest” is not really matter.
I think Twitter might be opening itself up to a competitor if Musk does something stupid with it. But Twitter is probably already pretty open to disruption as it is exactly for the reason big money sees wasted potential in it. “Owning” the space for public discourse is sort of twitters thing, but it’s much less good at it than LinkedIn is at owning corporate discourse as an example.
But it all sort of depends on what Musk does with it, doesn’t it? Maybe he will make it better.
Maybe not the day of the sale, but at the first whiff of him actually influencing policy I'd start shifting my social-media attention elsewhere. I already see more than enough shallow techno-feudalist opinionating on a certain other site, so I don't need Twitter heading (further) that way too.
As long as he follows through with the idea of a more open platform, with reduced censorship of unpopular people and ideas, I'd create an account. It would be a hopeful sign that freedom of expression isn't on a death march. And not that it would be easy, but I'd probably end up listening more often to people I disagree with.
Why? What I’m earth changes the next day? I’d you enjoy Twitter, use it. If it stops bringing you joy, stop using it. I, on the other hand, already dislike Twitter and may very well give it another chance under new leadership. But it’s just a social media account, everything doesn’t need to be some kind of statement. If you want to delete it, just do it, we don’t all need to hear about it.
What changes? The guy posting the position of Elon's jet is banned, obviously. And I'm sure he'd be petty enough to take a swipe at Chelsea Manning too, if not publically then using all dark pattern moderation tools available.
I don't even know who owns/CEOs it now. I'll be there with popcorn to see what happens but nah I doubt my usage of Twitter will change unless the platform goes boring first
I don't have the ability to downvote I have too little Karma after so many years but I have to ask why care about Twitter? It seems like a waste of time.
The cost to code and market a Twitter clone would be a tiny fraction of $45b. If the existing Twitter is so bad that Elon needs to buy it and save it, then the value of the userbase is low - particulary considering that the time cost for a user to switch is much lower than say a Myspace to FB shift.
I am assuming that Elon is not this much of a dumbass - what am I missing here?
> The cost to code and market a Twitter clone would be a tiny fraction of $45b.
No it wouldn't. Literally tons of people would do it and plenty of competitors have tried or are trying.
Per the value of the userbase and the cost of switching: well look at some of the competitors I mentioned, the ones Joe Rogan and others flock too when they get a temporary Twitter ban, do they not return immediately after their ban is lifted?
The cost of code and marketing can't beat Twitter's network effect. Getting Elon, Joe, and plenty of other personalities to move also is no guarantee that even a slight portion of the userbase switches.
This argument is double edged. If on the one hand you argue that the free speech twitter clones are uncompelling, you have to also agree that the proposed features are inconsequential, no? What's the point of Elon shaking things up?
I also think its odd to mix altruistic ideas like free speech platforms with profitable network effects. If it's just about speech, why can't such a platform co-exist with Twitter? Why does it need to overtake Twitter?
That's not how network effects work. Network effects lock users into the platform with the users, regardless of whether a new platform with better features comes along. That's the whole point of a network effect.
>If on the one hand you argue that the free speech twitter clones are uncompelling, you have to also agree that the proposed features are inconsequential, no?
No? It is entirely possible to imagine consequential features that are uncompelling: Actively hostile features.
>I also think its odd to mix altruistic ideas like free speech platforms with profitable network effects. Why does it need to overtake Twitter?
What is the value in Twitter over the "free speech" clones if Twitters audience doesn't have value?
Does Twitter have such unique features that couldn't be replicated much cheaper than the buy price?
Twitter's userbase is immensely valuable, but the company's execution has both been slow to unlock its full potential and also is on a fairly clear trajectory of eroding the window of permissible speech on the platform which presents grave risks to society at large. For an activist investor of the right type, the former checks the box of financial opportunity, and the latter checks the box of impact opportunity.
The point is the trajectory, not the position. Given network effects and other phenomena, there's good reason to think Twitter could converge on some kind of universal, global engine for the vast majority of all future short conversational written discourse.
I've yet to see any example where Musk "manipulated" the market to his own gain. People love to say this over and over but there's not a single shred of evidence I've ever seen about it.
Musk doesn't have a strong ability to deceive. He doesn't have strong interpersonal skills given his mental affliction. You should take what he says at face value other than when he's making an obvious joke and lots of things make a lot more sense.
Lewis' trilemma as always applies. He either a great deceiver, completely believes what he says but is beyond his ability, or actually will do what he says.
Musk has a trend of doing this with investments. It's purely speculative but I think it is reasonable to suggest based on Musk's previous actions I do not think he is serious about buying Twitter.
He paid 40 million because he would have lost a lot more by Tesla going bankrupt, and I'm not talking about money. He cares about the success of Tesla and SpaceX at a psychological and emotional level.
This is what makes Musk appealing. He doesn't care about the money. He cares about the future. Money is a means to an ends. As he's stated, the company only needs to make enough money to continue to grow. It doesn't need to be profitable above $0 after R&D.
He has been talking about the future for 20 years right now with little to show for. Tesla accounts for 1.3% of all cars sold in 2021.
In the same timeframe Microsoft put the future™ on every Americans desk, Apple put it in every pocket, Google created it on the web and Amazon delivered it to your door.
But of course people take all of that for granted because those companies never tried to substitute themselves to religion, in the sense that hope for the future™ is seen as a product to be pushed in the market to gain synchopants.
> He has been talking about the future for 20 years right now with little to show for. Tesla accounts for 1.3% of all cars sold in 2021.
Little to show for??? It's kind of hard to completely change the world consumer car purchases. 1.3% of all cars is HUGE. https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v... It takes a long long time to get this large, even if you're growing at over 50% to 100% per year which is a ridiculous growth rate.
> In the same timeframe Microsoft put the future™ on every Americans desk, Apple put it in every pocket, Google created it on the web and Amazon delivered it to your door.
You're comparing a company making real physical large objects to companies selling software. None of those companies even compare to Tesla.
> But of course people take all of that for granted because those companies never tried to substitute themselves to religion, in the sense that hope for the future™ is seen as a product to be pushed in the market to gain synchopants.
Because software, much as people like to tell you, will not solve all our problems. Software plays a key part of every industry and is integrating itself into more and more industries (like with Tesla and SpaceX with software being one of key aspects that make what they do work), but software itself will not change the future.
The Elephant in the room is what is being provided.
Elon is already at the limits of his hours on a daily basis to devote to things with SpaceX, Boring Company, Tesla, etc.
Picture it this way, Twitter is your startup and Elon proposes to buy you out. Would you not question how much time we would devote as part of the buyout talks?
It’s not relevant. Is anyone expecting him to be the CEO? Far more likely he’s going to appoint competent operators to run Twitter. Whether this is a good outcome for the shareholders is the only germane point up for discussion IMO.
Don’t you think it would have been very visible if he were bad at delegating? His companies tend to produce results - not always on time, but that’s to be expected in greenfield projects right?
> It’s not relevant. Is anyone expecting him to be the CEO?
The article quotes a shareholder rallying behind Musk's offer as justifying his support for Mr Musk's personal involvement.
The article includes quotes from shareholders such as “He has an established track record at Tesla,” and “He is the catalyst to deliver strong operating performance at Twitter.”
I'm not aware of a single instance where shareholders were excited by the prospects of the new owner delegating managent to a random unknown employee.
I dont really understand how Elon could just ignore Twitter, if something happens in Spacex, they can handle it in private, but if something happens in Twitter, like Trump is unbanned and he starts to share Russian propaganda, everyone is going to know about it right away.
Is Elon going to sit and focus on other things while his phone is going mad?
>>Is Elon going to sit and focus on other things while his phone is going mad
I would assume he would smile and laugh just like the rest of us non-authoritarian left people (we are the majority) as the Left drives itself insane with non-sense like what you just claimed....
Imparting one’s philosophy onto a platform that is for the most part static is the most one could do without bastardizing the platform.
Twitter’s biggest moves since its inception aside from TOS/legal/anti-evil have been character count, ads, timeline algorithm, gifs/videos/polls, and connecting NFTs to your avatar. Nothing groundbreaking on the user side.
Musk could get kudos for simply hiring an intern to add an “edit button” as he’s already hinted at.
I think Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX would disagree with that statement. As to day to day running of SpaceX, Elon did exactly that and seems to have picked the perfect person.
From a strictly financial shareholder perspective, it doesn’t matter if he shuts it down tomorrow.
There may be many people holding Twitter that care more about the product then the financials though.
I’ve been following SpaceX for many years. Usually, Musk says that he works only on SpaceX and Tesla. He spends basically no time on Boring or any of his other companies.
I doubt that he plans to run Tw himself. Tw’s problem is that it is run by ideologues. To remove the ideologues is the main goal of this entire move. That step alone would probably double the value of the company.
In my experience, in terms of moderation, it's mostly run on autopilot. Humans, if they're involved at all, have very little time for individual decisions and how often someone is reported seems to be the most important metric for their decision.
It would seem that Musk already spends a fair amount of his spare time using Twitter, for free. One might attribute no small amount of Tesla's stock price as well as his child with Grimes to it. Even with a diminishing amount of time to dedicate to running Twitter as a business, Musk is one of the most effective Twitter users of all time and clearly understands the platform on an intuitive level, which bodes well for any critical interventions he might make on it.
Aside from a supposed pedestrian tunnel in Texas and that Tesla demonstration tunnel in Las Vegas, Boring Company has delivered 0 tunnels. Pretty sure it was started for meme potential only.
The valuation for Twitter seems to be basically fair, so it wouldn't be surprising to see this deal eventually close. I think it's fair to say most people's view was that the biggest barrier to closing the deal was Musk actually making an honest offer. Which now, with Morgan Stanley actually standing behind the offer, looks more or less certain. So really it's going to be down to details which are unlikely to be an issue unless Musk uses some pretense to blow up the deal (I don't think that's hugely likely, but I think it's very possible).
What I find really interesting personally is that Twitter is a unique entity. It has practically failed to adapt over a decade. That is both good and bad. It has given it a very specific character and a very specific user base. We have seen over the years that it's very easy for social media companies to die rather than adapt. This has been shown in slow trends like people moving on from Facebook or all at once like at Digg. It's very easy to alienate users without attracting new ones. So it'll be very interesting to see what happens there.
> Which now, with Morgan Stanley actually standing behind the offer, looks more or less certain
Morgan Stanley only covers part of the total deal and Musk still needs to find a solid 21 billion from somewhere. That's probably doable for him but definitely not easy. I don't see it as "more or less certain" at least..
> Morgan Stanley only covers part of the total deal and Musk still needs to find a solid 21 billion from somewhere
Is Musk’s reputation so bad that he, the owner of a car company that turned the car industry on its head (by proving that electric cars were possible) and pushed a massive paradigm shift in the lithium ion battery industry/market (maybe helped with the meteoric rise in demand mobile devices in the last decade as well, admittedly) not be able to find and convince a consortium of investors to put money towards the buy out?
Maybe I’m too stuck on thinking of this as like the purchase of a sports team…
The man has several SEC processes against him in progress and most of his wealth is locked in Tesla, so financially I’d say he’s not in a great position unless he offloads Tesla stock.
> convince a consortium of investors to put money towards the buy out?
what would those investors get as collateral for this loan?
Musk has apparently already pledged some percentage of his Tesla holdings as collateral (i dont know how much, but i heard it's close to 50%).
If those investors take the other 50%, then i would imagine the holdings are over-pledged with no margin for safety. May be those investors would accept the terms, but i dunno.
The leading problem is that twitter is not profitable, so any loan for buying twitter requires an alternative source of income to service the interest.
> not be able to find and convince a consortium of investors to put money towards the buy out?
The pitch would seem to be "sure, you could buy into twitter a lot cheaper two weeks ago, but now I'm involved! How great is that?" You're right that it depends a lot on his reputation.
We do not want to "blow up the deal", a lot of effort & ongoing research has been applied to adapt without breaking it's purpose or charecter or brand.
> We have seen over the years that it's very easy for social media companies to die rather than adapt
I’d also argue that it’s very easy for a social network to be so dedicated to adapting for growth that it loses character. For example, how every single app these days seems to have a “story” feature.
In fact, Twitter had one too: fleets. They were pushed by an activist investor and flopped horribly. Best case Musk is a wonderful steward for the company, worst case we see ideas like fleets and much worse and Twitter loses much of what makes it unique in the first place.
No matter what Twitter does, they face legal issues. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
If they accept the deal at the proposed price, then the board will definitely get sued by the ones who bought TWTR at a higher valuation.
If they refuse the deal, then the board will definitely get sued by people who bought TWTR at a lower valuation.
No matter what they'll do, there's going to be _someone_ who's going to sue them.
I have a question for those who say things along the lines of twitter becoming "more open platform, with reduced censorship of unpopular people and ideas"
Wasn't the only "censorship" twitter has done simply against harmful misinformation and hate speech? What exactly is twitter censoring that's outside of those two?
I haven't used HN long enough to know why I can reply to some posts but not others, so sorry for this top level
Twitter said that their censorship was against misinformation and hate speech. A great many people noticed that their actual implementation was erratic, inconsistent, and partisan, and would like for them to stop.
I was banned from Twitter for posting a picture of a truck with expired tabs that had been dumped in a bike lane near my house that tagged the local police and city.
that's the problem. These days anything you don't agree with can be considered harmful misinformation and hate speech. A year ago, doubting the almost 100% efficiency of masks or vaccines was "harmful, dangerous and may result in deaths", these days it's "common sense and valid skepticism".
Here is a just one major example of censorship that was neither misinformation nor hate speech:
The Hunter Biden laptop story.
This story was broken by the right-leaning New York Post. Twitter banned its sharing in the weeks before the election, claiming it to be misinformation (with the implication that the leaking of its contents was part of a Russian plot).
~2 years later (when its relevance is greatly diminished) both the Washington Post [1] and the New York Times [2] have confirmed the major aspects of this story.
This was a coordinated censorship campaign, and a free speech platform would have allowed it to get the the sunlight it deserved.
Now, does it appear the NY Post's coverage was slanted and, in some areas, inaccurate? Yes. But that is where the rest of the media (including and especially Twitter) should have stepped in to perform its function in an open society: producing more and better speech.
It's also interesting to contrast it with Trump's tax returns. It was claimed even if true the hunter biden laptop was obtained illegally and therefore cannot be shared publicly.
Now, there are about a million other things that are probably obtained illegally talked about on twitter, but even so, obtaining and posting someone's tax returns online is actually illegal, and it was also for a presidential candidate, so it really should have qualified under the same rules to be censored if Twitter was consistent. Yet that was never blocked on Twitter.
They’d make more money from me (and I imagine at least a handful of others) if I could pay to have no ads, tracking, data sharing, or “algorithms” that I don’t explicitly control sorting and filtering content.
I can just turn off 'algorithmic timeline' and get a chronological timeline of tweets from people you follow. I would love to pay for no ads on twitter dot com.
The board is simply obligated to entertain the offer, they will reject as it is not in the best long term interest of the share holders. Yes it is monetarily competitive but also Twitter will basically lose most of their users if Elon is in charge. It's no secret that he has alt right motives.
A billionaire should not be able to do this in the first place.
I'd consider myself pretty far left, especially by American standards, but Musk is in no way some sort of crypto (in the traditional sense) fascist. He's got some pretty libertarian views on free speech, a blind spot for PoC, and that's about it. I'd hardly categorize that as "alt right".
Libertarianism is literally just liberalism before modern day US liberals coopted the name, hence the alternative label "classical liberal". In the rest of the world being a "liberal" still means the same thing.
> Libertarianism is literally just liberalism before modern day US liberals coopted the name
Once liberalism stopped being purely oppositional and established some power, there became a division between people for whom the progress achieved to date was the end goal and the people who saw it as partial.
In places where the success of liberalism also ushered in pluralism (not the US), the latter group got different names depending on exactly what they saw the end goal as...
In the US, once the early progress of liberalism was the right edge of the Overton Window, use of “liberal” and “conservative” as evolving relative-to-center terms for the directions on the primary axis of political dispute became fairly common, though even that fell apart as a consistent thing when part of the local “liberal” coalition turned sharply right with neoliberalism, resulting in an evolving use of differentiating language within the former “liberal” umbrella.
Yes, we should keep it under the influence shareholders like the Saudi Monarchy. Twitter users’ values definitely align with them??
Im curious why do you think a billionaire shouldn’t be able to buy a company?
I actually prefer it when several billionaires are “at odds” eg bezos vs musk. Rather than just silently agreeing and covering for each other as it has been for what feels like eternity.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadCalling him a showman and conman is great way to posture superiority over the guy shooting rockets into space and hiring 100k+ people
We tolerate the characteristics because of the perceived value, but it would also be nice to highlight genuinely good people with significant accomplishments for being successful as well as kind.
What he has done that is bad and why people hate him:
- Called somebody something bad on twitter once.
- Twits dumb memes with dumb humor sometimes
- Twitted about cryptocurrencies. People claim this is market manipulation to enrich himself without any evidence.
- Twitter 'Funding secured'. People believe this is made up, however it was conclusively settled. And even if it was not fully secured, there is little question he could have found the money. So not sure why people are so angry about that.
That seems to be most of the criticism I read. If that is the worst thing, I don't know what people are so worked up about.
Some leftists are angry he doesn't support unions, but of course almost no rich person (and many non rich people don't either).
I assume you're talking about the time he called a diver (and actual hero) a pedophile. It went a bit further than that - he hired a private investigator who tried (and failed) to dig up dirt on the man.
He created a false narrative about what Musk and his team of engineers (literal rocket engineers) were doing. Musk and his engineers had coordinated with the actual rescue team and the Mini-Sub they build was according to specification from the diving team who suggested they were not sure if the youngest and smallest child could be rescued with the conventional method they were planning.
The media of course presented this as Musk comes in and advocates for his own method of saving everybody and the 'hero' was a guy who pushed himself into the cheap sensationalist media by attacking Musk. The sensationalist media of course simply ran with that and were just to happy to publish anything negative about Musk.
That was of course during a time when Tesla was having challenges scaling and the 'Musk is a total idiot' storyline was getting lots of clicks.
In all, sure, Musk did something stupid but he didn't start it. He had never said anything bad about either this guy or the diving team. He had in fact done the opposite and expressed that it was good that their alternative solution in the end wasn't required.
But I guess anybody who pushes himself into the media who to insult Musk must be a hero.
If you don't want to consider a man who was instrumental in saving the lives of 12 boys a hero that's fine, there are lots of other adjectives that I'm sure you can find and they're all far more flattering than the one Musk made of himself in that saga.
Take a step back and think about what you're defending here. It's not a good look.
> instrumental
There was a professional diving team that saved the children he was not himself doing it.
And even if he was pushing yourself into the media and making headlines by insulting somebody who tried to help is not really a good look. Specially because it was not constitutive (or respectful) critism. It was simply a guy who wanted attention and got it.
> Take a step back and think about what you're defending here. It's not a good look.
I'm not defending what Musk said. It was clearly a stupid thing to say.
But if the main critism of a guy who lead 2 important technology companies for decades is 'he got too angry at somebody who insulted him in the media' then that is a pretty lame reason to hate him so much.
Your defences and explanations are all irrelevant and rely on minimising it as "saying something bad" and "on Twitter". That isn't adding anything to the conversation.
It's his job as a diver, is it not?
Divers dive, saving people is something a (probably very small) subset of divers do.
That being said, it was never Elons job to help, nor was it his job to develop a non-working submarine for the task. Or to be insulted when someone stated so. He did it for the PR and the fame, when he got neither was pissed and started insulting and harassing people.
This is exactly what Musk himself had said, can you please provide any sources for many paragraphs of unsubstantiated claims you just made? :)
"We love green businesses, wouldn't it be great if we had more electric cars and could kill oil?"
"We love science, especially rocket scientists!"
"Twitter can ban anyone they like, 1st amendment only applies to government, get your own Twitter if you don't like it!"
Waaaaait, not like thaaaaat!
Stop the hypocrisy.
If we can get a massively successful revolutionary business like SpaceX without someone like Steve Jobs I'd love it. But so far the sample size is small and there aren't any countering examples. History has thus far shown that you need people with strong personality and drive with some amount of lack of empathy in order to create massive shifts in the course of humanity.
Also, SpaceX isn't done.
Musk has never admired to having made up the funding. He settled the dispute because it lead to problems with Tesla credit rating, banks didn't want an outstanding dispute with SEC.
He says he did have funding secured. He elaborated on the details in the recent TED talk.
Do you have any privileged information about the incident or are you just casually calling someone a liar based on third-hand news you read online?
So, no, informed people are not "casually" calling him a liar.
I sincerely doubt that. Judges don’t tend to talk that way, regardless of the case at hand.
>I sincerely doubt that. Judges don’t tend to talk that way, regardless of the case at hand.
GP is probably refering to this (in which case you are right, judge didn't use words like liar)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/04/judge-in-musk-tr...
"Judge in Musk trial will tell jury that “Funding secured” tweets were false"
and
"[T]hough 'jury instructions are often an ineffective remedy,' the Court finds that unlikely to be true for the instant case where the jury will be told that the Court has already found that the August 2018 tweets were false and made with the requisite scienter [knowledge of wrongdoing]," Chen wrote.
Those are words like liar.
Doesn't seem like the funding secured thing was an outright lie.
Therefore, "funding secured" was absolutely an outright lie, unless words don't have meaning anymore.
I still think what he’s done at SpaceX and Tesla is admirable, but after reading those emails I’m definitely a few percent less confident that there will still be a Tesla to service my Model 3 in the future.
And actually he's not a "businessman" at all. He's an engineer at heart. "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.
He has not built anything.
Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer" [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
Selling a startup is not an engineering achievment but a business achievment.
> Also, his official title at SpaceX is "Chief Engineer"
Owning a company means you can give yourself whatever titles you want.
So your entire argument seems to boil down to "he wrote code for Zip2", which happened a quarter of a century ago.
EDIT: And they think they are Musk as well. Without the same ability to raise money that's incredible dangerous so.
Isn't that a little mean, and elitist?
No person is perfect. And Elon Musk certainly has flaws. But saying he's not built anything about someone playing a crucial role in 3+ huge companies just feels wrong.
If we compare him to the CEO's of the other Fortune 50 companies, he seems like one of the most engineering-minded.
I'm not saying he's never written a line of code. I'm saying he's vastly exaggerating his contributions to the technologies he is known for and his only "engineering" credentials are unspecified contributions to a dot com boom software company that repurposed an existing navigation database for its USP while essentially selling web listings to companies.
When people hear Musk is an "engineer" I doubt they're thinking of someone probably just writing some HTML2.0 pages and CGI Perl scripts, if that. It's also important to keep in mind that the history of Zip2 is scantly documented beyond "the brothers Musk founded it and then sold it for millions some years later" so we don't even know if Elon wrote even a single line of code or whether he meaningfully contributed to the software at all.
Even if we're exceptionally credulous and believe he wrote all of Zip2 himself, that makes him a programmer, not an engineer in the sense it is implied when talking about his involvement in Tesla or SpaceX. Knowing how to build physical machines is very different from knowing how to write software, and I say that as a seasoned software dev.
> "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.
This exact nonsense is why the autistic community was so displeased when he made a big show of having "asperger's" (which in the US under DSM-V is just autism, btw). Can we please stop justifying toxic and reckless behavior with "oh but they're autistic" as if we're talking about naive children not grown adults?
Autistics tend to struggle with ambiguity and social cues, yes, but many of us are even more sensitive to social cues than allistics because we literally had to learn to pick up on this shit to survive. A lot of autistics report actually being hyper-empathetic to the point where it can be debilitating because it's hard to filter out the noise and determine which cues you're supposed to pick up on and which ones you're supposed to ignore.
Elon Musk is a dickhead AND autistic. He's not a dickhead because he's autistic. He's naive because he got extremely lucky (like all billionaires do, even if it's only winning the lottery of being born into wealthy families with ample of business opportunities) and overestimates his own intelligence (which isn't helped by his massive fanbase thinking he's the best thing since sliced bread because he bought and funded some companies developing tech he thought was cool), not because he's autistic.
There's no such thing as "the autistic community" (though I won't deny some people may self-proclaim themselves as part of some non-existent community) and I'm not justifying anything by what I said. It's just how he thinks.
And I, as an autist, am telling you that this is a farcical caricature that is routinely used to excuse shitty behavior and at the same time deny us autonomy.
You just called the most successful businessman in the world an 'utterly inept businessman'.
Literally the wealthiest person in the world and all achieved through business success!
Defined and successfully delivering on multiple new markets, with a string of serial successes.
And in all the successful cases he had massive contributions by others. He provided the money, which is huge in itself. The actual work eas done by others, and the fact the Musk fails to properly say so, and that his fanboys believe every single of his claims, truely makes him the Steve Jobs of 2020s we deserve.
This is not true. He often mentions and emphasizes that the success is the work of his great teams. He also publicly acknowledged that he failed to do so in the past, but he is certainly doing it now.
Yes and yes
>The actual work eas done by others, and the fact the Musk fails to properly say so,
Give me one instance where Musk denies the work of his friends and colleagues at SpaceX and Tesla please, because this post reek of bad sentiment and an awful take.
Because if you had ever watched a full, unedited interview with him you’d be too embarrassed to post what you just did. He’s a pretty humble guy.
One of the best interviews with him was the one he did with the Babylon Bee - you should watch it; it’s up on Youtube.
Boeing probably has more and better engineers than SpaceX. Same with Toyota/Volkswagen compared to Tesla. Yet these companies simply cannot innovate. Talent (ability to do good work) is pointless without good leadership.
> the fact the Musk fails to properly say so
This is a lie.
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15170727534756003...
> The failures are mine, the successes belong to others
It is a different kind of innovation so, only considering "disruptuon" as innovation is quite short sighted so. Espiecially since Christensen himself differentiates between disruptive and sustaining (?) innovation.
GM had a pretty good EV in the 80’s - then killed it. Literally - never sold them, only leased them and forced owners to cough them back up and destroyed them.
I have zero interest in owning a Tesla - their stance on right to repair and their customer service sucks, but without them there wouldn’t be near the activity around EVs as there is now. Like him or not, Elon pretty much single handedly embarrassed the rest of the auto industry to have to take EVs seriously by proving that yes, EVs can be not only useful but cool.
And VW and others would care about EVs because of the general awareness about climate change.
Success is measured using market share not market cap or net worth of the CEO.
Tesla accounted for 1.3% of all cars sold in the world during 2021.
Stock price, net worth and number of synchopants getting on their knees are like a voting machine, market share is a weighting machine.
When you use the right metric it becomes crystal clear who are te guys setting records at the weighting machine.
It's the usual quiet ones: Buffett, Gates, Brin&Page, Tim Cook.
Not to mention the GOAT. Rockefeller left Standard Oil at #1 in market share and here we are in 2022 the companies which were under the umbrella of Standard Oil are still at #1.
Your measure of market share is a reasonable one, as are the two I proposed being profit and creating and succeeding in entirely new markets.
They are new markets too, it's not rockets, it's reusable rockets at incredibly lower cost to orbit and new capacities to previous ones, it's space based communication networks that are again a serious generational leap ahead of whatever was before, it's the emergence of a serious replacement for ICE vehicles. In all these markets, his companies are the only market share! He owns these markets, because he created them, and is multiple years ahead of the rest of the world's highly motivated competitors.
I'm not detracting from the successes of the other guys you mentioned. But Musk can very reasonably be called the world's most successful businessman at the moment on multiple metrics.
It might be a competition between Musk and others, but it's the opposite utterly inept, which was the point - trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the OP per HN guidelines, while also keeping the discussion grounded in rational sanity.
All the stuff you mentioned brings zero benefits to the consumer. The consumer wants a steady improvement in their quality of life in the next 3 months or less, and then you go from there hopefully adding one more bit in the next 3 months and so on.
There is a reason why Musk BS doesn't find fertile ground in NYC and his cult is largely based in California. Quartely (4 * 3 = 12) reports were adopted because people want to have a clear understanding of how a public company is improving the American consumer's quality of life, and they want it every 3 months.
Tesla accounted for 1.3% of all cars sold in the world in 2021, these are rich people toys we are talking about. 1.3% in 20 years.
> He owns these markets, because he created them
Cars are cars, EV, hybrid, gasoline, diesel...whatever. If you are in the business of making cars the relevance of your company should be judged based on what's you market share in car manufacturing compared against everybody who are also in the business of making cars.
Mr. Musk took 20 years to get to 1.3%. That's 80 Quarters. 1.3% / 80 = 0.01625% per quarter. What are we even talking about...
By this time around the govt. was already threatning Gates and Rockefeller to put them in jail because they had 95% market share of Operative Systems and oil respectively.
You can just compare the current situation.
This time, he got letters from people with money saying he can have it, and on what basis. Now that we see it, isn't it obvious that is what "funding secured" means, even if we don't all know exactly how high finance works?
"Funding secured" wasn't a half-truth, it was an outright lie that sounded a little like a half truth. Very Trumpian.
Also, it's recently been reported that a judge declared the question of whether "funding secured" was a knowing lie closed, in the sense that the jury in related ongoing litigation will be told that it's not up to them to decide that point.
Even though there's a bunch of people (including Carmack) that claim that he's a great engineer, it's really hard to believe when he's put out stuff like this. Like, did he use up all of his thinking fuel on designing rockets that he didn't understand why the boring company's mission was a total non-starter?
> it's really hard to believe when he's put out stuff like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw?t=122
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8ZBJWo73E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zlnbs-NBUI
This is how Musk actually talks.
> Like, did he use up all of his thinking fuel on designing rockets that he didn't understand why the boring company's mission was a total non-starter?
He doesn't spend a lot of time working on the boring company to be frank. It's a small side project. He's doing it to see if it's possible.
The fundamental point of boring company is to reduce the cost of underground boring. Shoving cars through tunnels is a means to an end of reducing the cost of underground boring. It's about finding a path to make some kind, any kind, of money off of boring in order to make the product development costs self-feeding. This is why the idea of cars driving through the tunnels was done rather than the original idea of putting cars on platforms through the tunnels. Cheaper and faster to market.
Musk started boring company with the idea that transportation needs to be 3 dimensional, and not just adding another single layer of transport under the ground (trains/subways), but having a whole ton of layers going deeper and deeper into the ground. Now they've done their first iteration of tunnel, which is quite bad, rinse and repeat until it gets cheaper.
BTW, Musk has never come out against subways, his point was just that in the US, people drive into cities in cars, so if they're using cars, then the transport system in the city needs to handle cars in a three dimensional way.
Moving transportation underground is such revolutionary idea that it exists for a century by now.
1. He wants to move roads to 3d just like computer chips are 3d. This should increase bandwidth.
2. He wants to packet switch the system instead of batch. This should lower latency.
3. For the first two to work, you need to greatly reduce the cost/speed to construct them. Think Moore's law.
4. One way to do this is to speed up the boring machines.
5. Another way is to lower the additional necessary equipment. Tunnels carrying internal combustion cars need air circulation lest people die from carbon monoxide poisoning/ lack of oxygen. EVs don't need that.
6. Smaller tunnels are much faster to construct so constructing one for a subway would be much slower than one for EVs.
Arguments against this can either attack the premise that cities are necessary (remote work), that bigger cities are necessary (why not have smaller cities), that existing or other transportation can handle it better, or one or more of the above chains of thought are flawed.
This line of thinking is also found in his latest factories where the line is just a line of cars moved by carriers that aren't physically anchored to the floor). He makes an analogy of factories as computer chips.
At most there are memory chips with just a few layers
Maybe not as much, but you’re still gonna need air circulation
You ignored the essential part of his well written and detailed explanation - its not about the fact that its underground, but the cost of creating underground pathways, for cars or whatever. It saddens me that bad posts like yours infect HN.
Or his proven track record of creating groundbreaking companies such as SpaceX and Tesla, which has made him the worlds richest man and why we are talking about him right now? Jeez
Who knows how we'll solve transport in the future? Maybe we'll all be in personal cars underground and any massive investments in rail will be for nothing?
It's a variant of the general idea of pushing things like elevated monorails that you know are so expensive they won't be built in the near future. Or, indeed, very low pressure tube transportation systems.
Car companies have done this type of lobbying work since forever. Just as the oil companies when they push for more production, but since all oil will be biofuel in the future, in the end it will be a net positive for the environment.
Self-landing rockets
Underground tunnel systems
Brain-computer interfaces
OpenAI leading AI research
PayPal
Accomplished? Meh!
EVs are over a century old. SpaceX was recreating NASA research. Subways have been a thing for over a century; literally millions of people use them every day. Paypal's tech stack used Thiel's startup's technology; they jettisoned everything from Musk's stack and moreover fired him for gross incompetence.
> EVs are over a century old.
But not an economic success and there was (and still is to be frank) no successful EV industry besides Tesla. A lot of fanfare with little results.
> SpaceX was recreating NASA research.
NASA and competitors dismissed any idea of landing rockets or even reusability in the first place. It was deemed a failed idea. This is why the SLS has been created by NASA as reusability was deemed a failure.
On the other items besides PayPal, they aren't successes yet so I'll reserve judgement.
On the whole "jettisoned" stuff there's a lot of conflicting reports on that and he wasn't fired.
Reading such an absurd and idiotic reductionist take on HN just makes me sad. I mostly speaks to you having absolutely zero knowlage about space technology and rocketry.
> moreover fired him for gross incompetence.
They fired him because he had a 10 year business plan to replace banks and become the main monetary system for all payments. A combination of being a bank, an online payment provider and Apple pay.
The other founders wanted to sell the company and make quick cash.
> Subways have been a thing for over a century;
Yeah such an asshole wanting to improve tunneling technology. Only assholes try to improve technology. We should just shoot anybody in the head who tries to improve on technology that is more then 10 years old.
I didn't say Elon Musk invented electric cars.
I'm saying he accomplished something in these fields.
If you want to pull him down among the rest of us, why don't you just point out that he's inhaling and exhaling in exactly the same way as everyone else?
In other news: honeybee tongue hairs repel water
Pssh, oil repelled water way before honey bees, they're not that special!
Definitely not a fan of his but hiring smart people and enabling them is an accomplishment.
As wealthy as he is, he didn’t inherit all of what he has today. He’s definitely done more than many people who come from wealth.
Not to sound “attacky” but that seems extremely naive.
Truthfully, he comes from wealth, but not close to the wealth he has today; his father owned half of an emerald mine for example.
He is quoted as saying (about his youth): "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe"
But yes, he absolutely comes from wealth. Just like most of them do.
If we were to translate 5% of the 2020 U.S. GDP today, that would be 5% of $20.807 trillion. Or about $1.404 trillion. So Bezos, with his $182.2 billion and Musk with his $264.6 billion, have A LONG way to go to catch up with Rockefeller.
Musk's companies have already revolutionized at least two hard-to-crack industries, aerospace and automotive, and are attempting more.
Your exercise in false equivalence is, well, an exercise in false equivalence.
Lines like that work better on a site where most of the people don't appreciate just how damned hard it is to build a business.
I am entirely skeptical he designed anything and considering the duds he's pretending are revolutionary (Boring, Hyperloop, Mars nonsense, Cybertruck, etc) but instead are failures it seems unlikely he could be so right about one thing and so wrong on others.
Trump is rich also
Even if you want to go with the idiotic 'he is not an engineer'-storyline to make yourself feel good, as a business man his credentials are literally unassailable.
To downplay business success as 'hired some smart people' is just ridiculous and utterly sad and depressing to read on a page that is hosted on 'ycombinator'. Get a grip and think before you write something.
Ever tried to count all the failed businesses that did the same?
The attrition rate of technological startups that match your description is insane. How many space startups from the early 2000s do even exist today?
“Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers. This breaks a lot of people's pattern-matching, in both directions.”
[1](https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1358760338724974594...)
You don’t have to imagine. It literally already happened once when he claimed he had funding secured to take Tesla private. As such, if you can’t imagine him not having funding secured this time, you’re severely lacking in imagination.
This time the plan seems to have better foundations.
I don't think he's lying.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdZZpaB2kDM
This is what Elon is saying and it sounds like a perfectly plausible scenario, under which you'd rather avoid the conflict and just shut up and sign and pay the fine.
Musk has also said he is going to launch legal action on this. Because that's almost exactly what happened, and it is unfair. So you are correct, and this saga probably still has more to go.
What's funny is almost anyone on the planet couldn't go up against someone like the SEC, which is why they can get away with this. Good on Musk for doing it.
That's how this discussion started: The SEC blackmailed Musk into signing a settlement or otherwise the SEC would block Tesla's accounts. Well, it's either that or Musk, in fact, did lie about the funding to take Tesla private. reasonable people believe the latter, other prefer option one. And then people still wonder were Tesla's evaluation comes from.
It's about financing of Tesla's debt. That's something that banks do, and banks could deny funding (even of a bank overdraft) for almost any reason really, like an SEC lawsuit.
No-one ever talked about any bank account being blocked. But in a world of debt, where debt is provided by institutions, if you can control who gets loans, you can control a lot.
Citing from like three levels of comment up-stream.
It is hard to look at the SEC’s most public actions in the last few years and not believe Musk here.
The banks didn't want a liability. The SEC disagreement was going to take too much time to resolve legitimately. If he didn't please the banks they wouldn't give him funding.
No, just the most famous braggart. Other people, i.e. actual experts and professionals, did all the actual work that he likes to lay claim to accomplishing.
As someone else pointed out, TWTR isn't a great purchase, either. Its ad revenue isn't great, so if he defaults on the loan, the lender is stuck with an asset they don't want.
I'm really not what you'd call a believer in Tesla - although had my first ever ride in a one (a model 3) recently, quite an eye-opening experience.
It's not as thought Tesla is the only company where the current valuation doesn't appear to make much sense looking at the numbers...
How so? I've had rides in Model S's before and it was totally... fine? What made the Model 3 experience so much better than a conventional car?
I didn't actually say "better", but it was certainly a novel experience since I'd never been in an EV of any kind! The lack of engine noise coupled with the acceleration, somewhat mind-blowing.
I'm not convinced that any current EV - never mind any Tesla - is yet a good fit for a family such as ours, but I look forward to the day when there is such a choice of vehicle.
Didn't he sell quite a lot of stock last year? Bear in mind he just keeps getting more of it as part of his compensation...
"Elon Musk unleashed a torrent of stock sales, options exercises, tax payment sales and gifted shares last year totaling nearly $22 billion.
Yet even after unloading so much Tesla stock, he still owns a larger share of the company than when he started, thanks to his compensation package.
Musk owns 172.6 million Tesla shares, or a 17% stake, which makes him its single largest individual shareholder."[0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/15/elon-musk-unloaded-billions-...
I do agree that the stock is way over-valued when looking only at the economic fundamentals, but when one balances out the “the Chinese have all this battery thing all figured out!” vs “we only have Tesla on our side!” then things are different (and, yes, I know that the “Tesla batteries” are not 100% made by Tesla right now).
How so ? It's a car company, there are dozen of them making equally good, if not better, cars. Autopilot is useless and electric cars are already there. You can credit them for the democratisation of EV but that's about it
The likes of Mercedes and VW are orders of magnitude behind, both when it comes to batteries and especially when it comes to software
Nothing about Tesla is strategic. SpaceX is different, sure. But with the exception of a yet-to-come lunar mission and astronaut trabsportation to the ISS the "West" got needed stuff into orbit just fine.
Well, that the "sleakness2 of software is a thing now when it comes to cars might make an Apple car difficult, the "sleek software" crowd is covered already. And there I was build quality, ride comfort and maintenance costs were also important when it comes to cars... Stupid me. But then I'm German, not sure if me driving French and old British cars offsets my ingrained sense of superiority of German car brands.
But yes, I agree Tesla is on its own in tremendously over selling its self driving tech.
Nobody cares about the software besides HN type people and the average user puts something like 40 miles per day on their car.
A far cry from "strategic asset" for the west, but you sure can program the car to make fart noises when you honk...
Certainly packaging Panasonic rolls into 2170s gives them a nice edge but it isn't exactly rocket science.
The Giga press is made by the Italian Idra Group. They have bought them out at the moment but anybody can start nabbing them for themselves if they got a spare $30m laying around.
Tesla is certainly "good at engineering", but their advantage is not really in original IP so much as organizational agility. Perhaps the incumbents are too bureaucratic to adapt but I wouldn't count them out just yet.
As for software, give me a break.
P.S. - I am actually a fan just not a fanboy.
> o much as organizational agility
That's why I insisted on the "better software" part, that's where much of their advantage comes from.
Maybe the Germans and the French can also source their batteries from the Chinese but they just haven't been able to put them to good use the way Tesla did (and does). For example right now Renault is selling a 20,000 euro EV (produced in China, of course) [1] which has atrocious autonomy, to say nothing of the fact that it feels very small. And that is supposed to be one of their main vehicles when it comes to targeting the EV mass-market, from one of the biggest car makers in the world. It's a complete joke.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacia_Spring
Here is Doug Demuro reviewing the Volkswagen ID Buzz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4JraQ6KrVM
tl;dr: It is fine.
Here he is reviewing the Rivian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYrunRy8hmw
tl;dr: It is excellent. In fact he says "coolest pickup truck ever made". People who were excited about the cyber truck and know cars would rather get this one.
> Maybe the Germans and the French can also source their batteries from the Chinese but they just haven't been able to put them to good use the way Tesla did (and does).
Well.. I don't know about the French. ;)
But Volkswagen will make you an electrified Golf just fine. And that is the best selling car in Europe. Toyota will make you a Yaris and a boring beige Prius.
The bz4x is out now and getting good reviews: https://www.toyota.co.uk/new-cars/bz4x
It is just fine, and slightly cheaper, and so longer term it is unclear how it will all play out.
Based on teardowns Tesla is innovating here but even if they have an edge it is a tiny one (single digit percentage) because of diminishing returns.
I remember WeWork being a software company, not a commercial landlord.
That said, I agree that Tesla's software is significantly better than every competitor, but Autopilot is behind the other self-driving players, and I'd rather have dials than a touchscreen, anyway.
https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/tesla-s-mai...
"Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Heartland America, you have just subsidized a bunch of millionaires living in California's most expensive coastal ZIP codes to the tune of $10,197 per car. I'm sure they are sending you a thank-you card."
It would be hilarious if it turns out that the government is interested in a private Twitter for "enhanced" data collection and analysis.
Mr and Mrs Heartland America should be more concerned about the subsidies for oil companies; what are those meant to accomplish exactly?
Quoting the excellent Matt Levine, the situation is more like the following: '''the answer to the question “might Elon Musk have made an offer to take a large public company private, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, without giving any real thought to where the money would come from?” is “absolutely yes, and he’s done it before.”'''
Always be skeptical of what is widely reported on the news and don't blindly listen to what is being said by the brainless parrots on twitter re-tweeting everything that they think is 'going' to happen. Especially even if this deal goes through. As I said before. [1]
As always, not even the most upvoted or top comments are correct either. It's yet another bias projection.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30984349
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30984397
The mainstream media takes on Musk and Twitter have certainly been something. For some reason, he's been coded as 'right wing' by many among the media set, and is getting the treatment that those coded that way get. The available evidence doesn't support that coding, and it all shouldn't matter anyway.
I Support The Current Thing
5 words that drive the Twitterati nuts because it encapsulates their whole online existence.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/elon-musk-holding-compan...
https://theconversation.com/amp/if-elon-musk-succeeds-in-his...
Fighting bots seems to me the opposite of 'allow disinformation'.
Also, are we currently blocking people for pushing disinformation? Did I miss something?
Also I've lost count of how much of last year's 'disinformation' became this year's 'that totally happened'.
Interviewer: You've described yourself, Elon, as a free speech absolutist, but does that mean that there's literally nothing that people can't say and it's okay?
Musk: Well, I think obviously Twitter or any forum is bound by the laws of the country that it operates in. So obviously there are some limitations on free speech in the US, and, of course, Twitter would have to abide by those rules. [...] No, I think, like I said, in my view Twitter should match the laws of the country
Quite a struggle for an international website, where the majority of users are outside of the US, to just say "we should follow the laws of countries" as if there's one single internationally compatible law for that.
I can promise you, no matter what he does, people/sites you follow will likely extol how terrible the platform has gotten with disinformation/hate speech, even if he does nothing. How will you protect against that negativity bias? Do you have an objective way to know whether it's gotten worse or not, or are you going to rely on anecdotes from the sources you follow?
It seems rather narcissistic to think that deleting your account would be of any consequence or inflict punishment on anyone. To put it bluntly, someone farting in their own car on the highway (and potentially soiling themselves, getting distracted, and causing a chain-reaction accident) has a greater potential impact to future events than whatever irrelevant drivel you (or I, or anyone) posts on Twitter.
For better or worse, Twitter has become the de-facto town square. The clones have tried and failed because the momentum to move sufficient numbers en masse just isn't there. Do you honestly believe that Musk is such an unpleasant figure that hoards of people would suddenly leave the platform? Where would they go? A digital Jonestown?
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/joe-rogan-says-gained-2-122749909.htm...
It's also as idiotic as all the people who were rage-tweeting their airline a week ago, upon suspension of the mask policy in the US, threatening to take their business elsewhere, only to have every major airline follow suit in the span of 6 hours.
I hope they enjoyed their bus ride, otherwise they'd have to just sit there and take it. I suppose getting your pilot's license isn't out of the question. It might be easier than building your own Twitter.
If you have to put a real, verified name behind these posts, at least that can cut into the massive bot armies spreading disinformation and the massive foreign spending that goes into amplifying all of it.
Then you would have the benefits of a free speech platform while preventing it from becoming a psunami of noise.
You have to stand behind what you say, because your real name is on it. True, we do have politicians and others trying to spin destructive narratives and spread falsehoods, but it is their right in the United States to do so, as long as it does not run awfoul of existing laws.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354
Anonymity is very valuable, especially for some of societies' most vulnerable, who should have a place on social media.
We can't have that.
FTFY.
I mean, jesus, just read the replies from any political post by damn near anyone who is slightly Twitter famous.
It's absolute trash heaped upon burning trash heaped upon dog shit.
> Am I the only one? Would his acquisition spell the beginning of the end for Twitter?
And for all Twitter blue checks to go where? Tik Tok?
Twitter can be a pretty hostile place if you’re not a white straight man, can’t see Musk making it any betters for those people who are currently harrassed fir being women, queer or colored
I've never seen that. I've been a Twitter user since 2009.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
Whoa, where are you getting that?
I feel that 'assume good faith' has its limits since those who comment in bad faith have no restrictions while others are forced to respond as though nothing is wrong. So sometimes I feel the need to respond a bit more aggressively, maybe that's not in the goals of the site though.
I’m in the “fortunate” position to not have strong feelings about Musk either way. I may delete my Twitter account if he takes the company private, but that will be more of protest against billionaires owning platforms that I think should be non-profit organisations because of their public impact. That being said, I’m not sure how that is even relevant to most people here on HN as my “protest” is not really matter.
I think Twitter might be opening itself up to a competitor if Musk does something stupid with it. But Twitter is probably already pretty open to disruption as it is exactly for the reason big money sees wasted potential in it. “Owning” the space for public discourse is sort of twitters thing, but it’s much less good at it than LinkedIn is at owning corporate discourse as an example.
But it all sort of depends on what Musk does with it, doesn’t it? Maybe he will make it better.
That would make Twitter the only big tech company with free speech as a core issue.
Nowadays even small tech like DuckDuckGo is actively cherry picking which propaganda to display.
I am assuming that Elon is not this much of a dumbass - what am I missing here?
No it wouldn't. Literally tons of people would do it and plenty of competitors have tried or are trying.
Per the value of the userbase and the cost of switching: well look at some of the competitors I mentioned, the ones Joe Rogan and others flock too when they get a temporary Twitter ban, do they not return immediately after their ban is lifted?
The cost of code and marketing can't beat Twitter's network effect. Getting Elon, Joe, and plenty of other personalities to move also is no guarantee that even a slight portion of the userbase switches.
I also think its odd to mix altruistic ideas like free speech platforms with profitable network effects. If it's just about speech, why can't such a platform co-exist with Twitter? Why does it need to overtake Twitter?
No? It is entirely possible to imagine consequential features that are uncompelling: Actively hostile features.
>I also think its odd to mix altruistic ideas like free speech platforms with profitable network effects. Why does it need to overtake Twitter?
What is the value in Twitter over the "free speech" clones if Twitters audience doesn't have value? Does Twitter have such unique features that couldn't be replicated much cheaper than the buy price?
I really feel like a lot of you guys vastly overestimate the impact of Twitter on The Real World. Elon Musk included.
Musk doesn't have a strong ability to deceive. He doesn't have strong interpersonal skills given his mental affliction. You should take what he says at face value other than when he's making an obvious joke and lots of things make a lot more sense.
Lewis' trilemma as always applies. He either a great deceiver, completely believes what he says but is beyond his ability, or actually will do what he says.
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-226
Musk has a trend of doing this with investments. It's purely speculative but I think it is reasonable to suggest based on Musk's previous actions I do not think he is serious about buying Twitter.
Also there's recent news that Musk was forced to settle despite believing that he would have won the case because bankers were holding Tesla hostage.
This is what makes Musk appealing. He doesn't care about the money. He cares about the future. Money is a means to an ends. As he's stated, the company only needs to make enough money to continue to grow. It doesn't need to be profitable above $0 after R&D.
He has been talking about the future for 20 years right now with little to show for. Tesla accounts for 1.3% of all cars sold in 2021.
In the same timeframe Microsoft put the future™ on every Americans desk, Apple put it in every pocket, Google created it on the web and Amazon delivered it to your door.
But of course people take all of that for granted because those companies never tried to substitute themselves to religion, in the sense that hope for the future™ is seen as a product to be pushed in the market to gain synchopants.
Little to show for??? It's kind of hard to completely change the world consumer car purchases. 1.3% of all cars is HUGE. https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v... It takes a long long time to get this large, even if you're growing at over 50% to 100% per year which is a ridiculous growth rate.
> In the same timeframe Microsoft put the future™ on every Americans desk, Apple put it in every pocket, Google created it on the web and Amazon delivered it to your door.
You're comparing a company making real physical large objects to companies selling software. None of those companies even compare to Tesla.
> But of course people take all of that for granted because those companies never tried to substitute themselves to religion, in the sense that hope for the future™ is seen as a product to be pushed in the market to gain synchopants.
Because software, much as people like to tell you, will not solve all our problems. Software plays a key part of every industry and is integrating itself into more and more industries (like with Tesla and SpaceX with software being one of key aspects that make what they do work), but software itself will not change the future.
Elon is already at the limits of his hours on a daily basis to devote to things with SpaceX, Boring Company, Tesla, etc.
Picture it this way, Twitter is your startup and Elon proposes to buy you out. Would you not question how much time we would devote as part of the buyout talks?
He doesn't need to spend much time with his companies to damage them.
Couple of questions spring to mind:
1. Can you define "damage"?
"Elon Musk poised to collect $23bn bonus as Tesla beats targets" [0]
"Tesla reported record revenue and profits for the first quarter of 2022 [..]"[1]
2. Would you say the current management of Twitter are doing a good job on behalf of their shareholders?
"Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates; revenue forecast light"[2]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/21/elon-musk-s...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/04/20/elon-musk-...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-misses-ad-revenue...
You think Elon Musk created two of the most valuable companies in the world without being good at delegating?
I think pretty highly of him, but not that highly.
The article quotes a shareholder rallying behind Musk's offer as justifying his support for Mr Musk's personal involvement.
The article includes quotes from shareholders such as “He has an established track record at Tesla,” and “He is the catalyst to deliver strong operating performance at Twitter.”
I'm not aware of a single instance where shareholders were excited by the prospects of the new owner delegating managent to a random unknown employee.
I look forward to seeing who Elon pickes to replace all board members and executives at twitter
I would assume he would smile and laugh just like the rest of us non-authoritarian left people (we are the majority) as the Left drives itself insane with non-sense like what you just claimed....
Twitter’s biggest moves since its inception aside from TOS/legal/anti-evil have been character count, ads, timeline algorithm, gifs/videos/polls, and connecting NFTs to your avatar. Nothing groundbreaking on the user side.
Musk could get kudos for simply hiring an intern to add an “edit button” as he’s already hinted at.
How much time he can spend is a much bigger question if he’s being hired to run the joint.
I doubt that he plans to run Tw himself. Tw’s problem is that it is run by ideologues. To remove the ideologues is the main goal of this entire move. That step alone would probably double the value of the company.
In my experience, in terms of moderation, it's mostly run on autopilot. Humans, if they're involved at all, have very little time for individual decisions and how often someone is reported seems to be the most important metric for their decision.
Aside from a supposed pedestrian tunnel in Texas and that Tesla demonstration tunnel in Las Vegas, Boring Company has delivered 0 tunnels. Pretty sure it was started for meme potential only.
Oh, and the “flamethrower”
But it could also be another Theranos.
I’ll leave the guessing to other people.
What I find really interesting personally is that Twitter is a unique entity. It has practically failed to adapt over a decade. That is both good and bad. It has given it a very specific character and a very specific user base. We have seen over the years that it's very easy for social media companies to die rather than adapt. This has been shown in slow trends like people moving on from Facebook or all at once like at Digg. It's very easy to alienate users without attracting new ones. So it'll be very interesting to see what happens there.
Morgan Stanley only covers part of the total deal and Musk still needs to find a solid 21 billion from somewhere. That's probably doable for him but definitely not easy. I don't see it as "more or less certain" at least..
Is Musk’s reputation so bad that he, the owner of a car company that turned the car industry on its head (by proving that electric cars were possible) and pushed a massive paradigm shift in the lithium ion battery industry/market (maybe helped with the meteoric rise in demand mobile devices in the last decade as well, admittedly) not be able to find and convince a consortium of investors to put money towards the buy out?
Maybe I’m too stuck on thinking of this as like the purchase of a sports team…
The man has several SEC processes against him in progress and most of his wealth is locked in Tesla, so financially I’d say he’s not in a great position unless he offloads Tesla stock.
what would those investors get as collateral for this loan?
Musk has apparently already pledged some percentage of his Tesla holdings as collateral (i dont know how much, but i heard it's close to 50%).
If those investors take the other 50%, then i would imagine the holdings are over-pledged with no margin for safety. May be those investors would accept the terms, but i dunno.
The leading problem is that twitter is not profitable, so any loan for buying twitter requires an alternative source of income to service the interest.
Imagine staking 50% of Tesla against owning Twitter, which feels like it's on a slow but steady death spiral.
The pitch would seem to be "sure, you could buy into twitter a lot cheaper two weeks ago, but now I'm involved! How great is that?" You're right that it depends a lot on his reputation.
Same Twitter, just better.
I’d also argue that it’s very easy for a social network to be so dedicated to adapting for growth that it loses character. For example, how every single app these days seems to have a “story” feature.
In fact, Twitter had one too: fleets. They were pushed by an activist investor and flopped horribly. Best case Musk is a wonderful steward for the company, worst case we see ideas like fleets and much worse and Twitter loses much of what makes it unique in the first place.
If they accept the deal at the proposed price, then the board will definitely get sued by the ones who bought TWTR at a higher valuation. If they refuse the deal, then the board will definitely get sued by people who bought TWTR at a lower valuation. No matter what they'll do, there's going to be _someone_ who's going to sue them.
Wasn't the only "censorship" twitter has done simply against harmful misinformation and hate speech? What exactly is twitter censoring that's outside of those two?
I haven't used HN long enough to know why I can reply to some posts but not others, so sorry for this top level
that's the problem. These days anything you don't agree with can be considered harmful misinformation and hate speech. A year ago, doubting the almost 100% efficiency of masks or vaccines was "harmful, dangerous and may result in deaths", these days it's "common sense and valid skepticism".
The Hunter Biden laptop story.
This story was broken by the right-leaning New York Post. Twitter banned its sharing in the weeks before the election, claiming it to be misinformation (with the implication that the leaking of its contents was part of a Russian plot).
~2 years later (when its relevance is greatly diminished) both the Washington Post [1] and the New York Times [2] have confirmed the major aspects of this story.
This was a coordinated censorship campaign, and a free speech platform would have allowed it to get the the sunlight it deserved.
Now, does it appear the NY Post's coverage was slanted and, in some areas, inaccurate? Yes. But that is where the rest of the media (including and especially Twitter) should have stepped in to perform its function in an open society: producing more and better speech.
[1] https://archive.ph/znP14
[2] https://archive.ph/i3Ip8
Now, there are about a million other things that are probably obtained illegally talked about on twitter, but even so, obtaining and posting someone's tax returns online is actually illegal, and it was also for a presidential candidate, so it really should have qualified under the same rules to be censored if Twitter was consistent. Yet that was never blocked on Twitter.
A billionaire should not be able to do this in the first place.
If it's no secret, can you cite some sources?
Feel free to summarize the point if there's any.
Once liberalism stopped being purely oppositional and established some power, there became a division between people for whom the progress achieved to date was the end goal and the people who saw it as partial.
In places where the success of liberalism also ushered in pluralism (not the US), the latter group got different names depending on exactly what they saw the end goal as...
In the US, once the early progress of liberalism was the right edge of the Overton Window, use of “liberal” and “conservative” as evolving relative-to-center terms for the directions on the primary axis of political dispute became fairly common, though even that fell apart as a consistent thing when part of the local “liberal” coalition turned sharply right with neoliberalism, resulting in an evolving use of differentiating language within the former “liberal” umbrella.
Im curious why do you think a billionaire shouldn’t be able to buy a company?
I actually prefer it when several billionaires are “at odds” eg bezos vs musk. Rather than just silently agreeing and covering for each other as it has been for what feels like eternity.