It's instructive to contrast what other billionaires did with media properties they owned:
- Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone and let the editors run it. What Jeff did do was invest some money into the IT department to modernize the workflow tools (metrics dashboards, etc) for journalists. He stayed out of the decisions of what stories get run on the front page.
- Rupert Murdoch owns Wall Street Journal but when Elizabeth Holmes asked him to squash negative stories about Theranos, he refused and stayed out of it. He let his editors run the stories even though it embarrassed him because he was a big investor.
Both those guys are more detached from those media outlets and don't meddle in it day to day.
What tech people like Paul Graham and others were hoping was for Elon to apply his scientific first principles type of thinking that he demonstrated previously at SpaceX+Tesla to Twitter. E.g. Tesla A.I. competency to clean up the bots and make the platform better.
Instead, Elon let the Twitter monster abuse his ego and his reputation as a savior is ruined.
Best thing Elon should have done was to focus only on the technical aspects of Twitter and let some more level-headed less-emotional people manage the editorial aspects.
Hopefully, Elon notices that we don't have endless HN and reddit front page articles about Rupert Murdoch's jet.
Bezos is one thing, but I'm not sure if Murdoch is a great example: he perhaps refused to spike specific articles, but his entire media empire is built around promulgating his (increasingly revanchist) politics. His success is attributable not to "staying out of it," but to having a receptive audience that he (to waxing and waning degrees) has successfully influenced for the last 30 years.
Besides, I don't think Twitter is what did Elon's reputation as a "savior" in. The current affair is more reaffirming than opinion shifting, for everyone I've talked to.
>, but his entire media empire is built around promulgating his (increasingly revanchist) politics.
Yes, I understand that and we know that WSJ leans more conservative than New York Times. Murdoch's empire reflects his worldview.
I mean "stay out of it" as in micro-managing day-to-day newspaper stories or writing constant op-eds to respond to his critics. That's the type of distracting minutiae that Elon has sucked himself into with hyper-reactive Twitter bans and incoherent replies with juvenile statements.
Murdoch is the worst possible example, being in it up to his eyeballs. It's especially the case in Australia, where his empire started and still dominates. This article is one of many, its headline and opening line being:
"Special report: Rupert Murdoch, a hands-on newspaperman"
"To illustrate the extent to which Rupert Murdoch used to micro-manage his newspapers,..."
>"To illustrate the extent to which Rupert Murdoch used to micro-manage his newspapers,..."
The 2011 article you linked emphasizes his activity with tabloid newspapers. I'm unfamiliar with those. From what I've read, he doesn't meddle with his "prestige" newspaper like WSJ. Maybe that's why the WSJ didn't censor itself on negative Theranos stories even though he invested $125 million in it and Elizabeth Holmes asked him to kill the articles.
I can't speak to the WSJ, and perhaps it's a good example of the owner not meddling, but using Rupert Murdoch as an example of someone who doesn't meddle in their media empire invites a lot of questions.
Rupert Murdoch's influence is a very hot topic in Australia, with 2 former prime ministers from opposite sides teaming up to try to push a royal commission into his media monopoly, and in particular his influence on elections. Some of the commission is directed at the actions of his properties, but a lot of it is directed at his specific meddling as an individual. There have been many claims of directives and squashed stories coming straight from the top, whether that's from him or Lachlan Murdoch.
As someone who reads Washington Post, NYTimes and WSJ daily, I too find their (WSJ's) reports trust worthy and accept the facts presented without too much fact-cheking. However, the editorial board and the opinion section are where Murdoch's influences reflect. The facts presented there are mostly murky and sometimes half-truths. I even found some "facts" that were out-right wrong and intentionally so.
They conspired to hide a leak that they thought would tip the election. Not that the leak was only dick pics, but if dick pics were enough to tip the election wouldn't that still be a valid expression of voter will?
> I assume you’re very mad at Russia too?
But, but, whatabout the other guys!
No, because I don't have a reason to trust Putin or the Russians, and neither do US citizens. But they do have a reason, and a right, to trust their elected officials.
The “twitter files” links has the Biden campaign reporting dick pics. We can actually view the links mentioned via the Internet Archive. Oops.
And no they don’t have a right for something illegal (revenge porn, unconcent) and the company certainly has their own right to censor how they want and choose who they listen to.
The Russian thing was about the actual facts about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election and if you were crowing about that influence too.
I didn't say that I did. The scope of "corrupt dealings" is much wider than the scope of illegal dealings.
It contains possibly legal things that the voters might find to be a turn-off, such as the ne'er-do-well son selling access to his dad in his official position.
You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Source that the FBI/Dems/etc only sent dick-pic links to be censored, or proof that the laptop leak contained more than dick pics?
Earlier in this thread you made a claim that the leak was only dick pics, have you read a source which claimed that, or is it only that you haven't seen a source talk about anything else?
I don't know the entire contents but it is certainly more than just dick pics. I've heard someone discuss using the dates in those to corroborate other stories which means they aren't just salacious either.
Umm..in latest release of Twitter files, you had members of the Biden administration reaching out to explicitly ban and de-platform accounts including accounts that simply showcased the CDC's actual data. There was severe and direct pressure from the white house to ban accounts of US citizens.
I cannot think of a more fundamental violation of the US first amendment.
And you're limiting this to only things disclosed during the Elon Twitter-files?
Because Jack Dorsey said to congress that they blocked the NYPost story because of reports by the dems and the FBI. The NYPost's story didn't have porn thus they reported at least some non-porn links.
We've known the broad strokes of this for quite a while and it's just the emails and chat logs of the conspirators that we're seeing for the first time now.
Normally you'd be right about how you can't prove something doesn't exist, but if you go up thread you'll see that xcrunner claimed that the laptop contained only dick-pics. It's fair for Alvah to ask for proof.
Had xcrunner simply asked for proof the burden would be on Alvah to provide it, but because xcrunner made a claim he took the burden of proof on himself.
Probably true, but the tabloid newspapers are what he uses to influence the public. Since this is a family website I won't express my feelings abut Rupert Murdoch.
He didn't discriminate with his Australian broadsheets. Maybe US editors have more spine than Australian editors?
The Murdoch dynasty (Keith, Rupert, Lachlan, ...) are master newspapermen. Why burn goodwill killing a story about money that is already lost when that goodwill could be spent on influencing even bigger things?
I think Murdoch is an excellent example to compare against Musk, right now. Not because he’s an exemplar of the non-interventionist, but because he’s all business. He will buy businesses, that are profitable, that present ideas against his current, perceived, goals. This is hedging his bets, somewhat.
Musk, on the other hand, buys business, regardless of profitability, that suit his personal goals. Then make managing decisions based on whim.
The difference isn’t that Murdoch lets others do the talking and Musk does his own, for better or worse. It’s that Murdoch makes business decisions and Musk makes emotional decisions.
To be clear - I’m not trying to suggest one is better than the other. Just that they are a very interesting comparison.
Outside of the absurdly conservative WSJ opinion pages, I wouldn't even say that. The Wall Street Journal is the paper of Wall Street, it has a slight inherent pro-business bias but besides that it reports the news fairly and accurately.
The rest of Murdoch's business empire is nothing like it, compare WSJ.com to FoxNews.com at any given point and you'll see a drastic difference.
> Outside of the absurdly conservative WSJ opinion pages, I wouldn’t even say that. The Wall Street Journal is the paper of Wall Street, it has a slight inherent pro-business bias but besides that it reports the news fairly and accurately.
The WSJ had a right-wing political bias (beyond just a vague pro-business bias) under Dow Jones (in the news, not just the–even then–absurdly right-wing opinion pages), and it got stronger under Murdoch (I haven’t read it as much in recent years, but I did regularly around and for a while after the takeover.) It’s not strident in tone (outside of the opinion pages) the way that Fox News is, but its notable both in story selection and focus.
News reporting is one thing, opinion reporting is its own beast, and I think a lot of people are not considering the difference much if at all. Murdoch and Bezos and others like that can craft a narrative through opinion reporting decisions without touching the news. The discussion seems to mix the two when the opinion pieces craft thought far more than news story selection.
I would put WSJ to more of a centre than either left or right of political ideology assuming we can ignore their conservative leaning Opinions writers.
The editorial pages of WSJ are definitely conservative. The news side tends to lean center left. As a conservative and subscriber to Wall Street journal for the past 6 years, the news side regularly butts heads with editorial side.
How are you defining “center left”? The only way I could see that working is if you’re defining that as acknowledging climate change is real or something similar.
Maybe OP's statement should be revised from "staying out of it" to "giving the appearance of staying out of it."
You are undoubtedly right that Murdoch's political influence is everywhere in Fox News and his other, very profitable, properties.
But have you ever heard a single juicy sound bite by Murdoch about Hillary Clinton, or Obama, or "wokeness?"
I just checked: turns out he's made a handful of comments, all of which basically qualify as obscure. He stays out of the way, despite running what is maybe the most politically impactful business of our times.
Compare to Musk, who, just a week or two ago, tweeted "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci."
Actually, there is evidence this is overplayed. In the U.K. there are multiple newspapers owned by Murdoch.
During the Brexit referendum campaign, one came out pro-Remain (The Times), and one pro-Leave (The Sun). Which one did Rupert want to win?
In truth his media has perfected the echo chamber: they echo back to the audience what they already believe.
It’s for this reason a middle class paper and working class paper can be so divided and why his US operational flagship (Fox News) can be vehemently politically opposed to his UK operational flagship (The Times).
He’s not schizophrenic - he knows to play his hand very, very lightly and the rest of it is all based on audience research these days.
I've never been and still am not a big Washington Post reader, but I have seen a lot of very pro-billionaire headlines from the Washington Post. I can't help but wonder if Bezos might be directly or indirectly a factor in that.
Murdoch is of course well known for using his media empire to promote his own political interests. His British tabloids were ridiculously strongly pro-Brexit because Murdoch was a respected guest at Downingstreet, but didn't have any meaningful influence in Brussels.
Good question! I had to look this up, but apparently The Times had legally protected editorial independence as part of the deal that allowed Murdoch to buy it. Unfortunately, that independence ended last January:
Elon is not a savior because no one is purely a savior. He is a genius at hardware who badly needs to shut the fuck up and have people rein him in sometimes. Twitter has always been his weakness, and he needs to have emotional maturity and hire a new CEO, then stay off of it entirely for two weeks
I am a big Musk critic, but I think his rise demonstrates a genius for hype and PR. The amount of free media and cheap capital that Tesla got was extraordinary, and I think that was down to Musk.
But I think Musk is also a good example of the reason that I would probably not work for a company whose head is a sales guy. Salespeople are great at hype, but they often do it by living in a fantasy land, and someone insufficiently connected to reality is in charge, things can get wacky. I knew of one place where the CEO was absolutely great at closing deals, but he would do it by promising more new features than the company could build. The well-meaning tech people did their best, but rushing to meet the CEO's promises meant a worse and worse code base, with bug counts skyrocketing and feature velocity slowing.
At Tesla and SpaceX, he apparently had competent people in charge to buffer his impulses and direct him toward what he's good at. But here we see that fantasy dynamic play out as he absolutely flails around trying to run a business that he doesn't really understand after firing most of the people who did and terrifying the remainder. If anything, I think the Twitter saga demonstrates that on his own, he's actually bad at a bunch of core business skills.
> I am a big Musk critic, but I think his rise demonstrates a genius for hype and PR. The amount of free media and cheap capital that Tesla got was extraordinary, and I think that was down to Musk.
A big falsifying hypothesis from this would be to predict that there are NOT any high-up PR staff of notable quality that have been around him for a long time.
If the PR people around him evince no particular talent for it and have been in constant flux for the duration of Musk's career such that he is the only constant, then yea, there'd probably be something to this.
Otherwise, if there is at least one person that was in his inner circle for a critical period of time that can also be said to have strong PR talent, then it's questionable ... sometimes success is having, on top of other things, the right team.
But choosing the right team is part of being a successful business man. I still think it's fair to credit him for SpaceX despite Gwynne Shotwell and his engineers running the company; he founded it, he brought the vision and he hired the right people.
Elon had a lot of luck, no doubt, but his track record is simply impressive and for that, I think it's fair to say that he has extraordinary talent.
> But choosing the right team is part of being a successful business man.
Sure, but it becomes hard to distinguish luck from talent. How would you know that an up and coming but talented PR person didn’t pick him? Or that was random?
It’s the major flaw with idolisation. Ends and means aren’t that tightly coupled. Against the utility of idolising someone, is the noise worth it? Ever?
Twitter is drama entertainment. As far as I can see Elon and the platform are perfect for eachother. Messy as it is. Twitter hasn't gotten as much attention since so seems like he is doing something's right.
There's only so much fuel for that fire and it seems like it's running out now that he's no longer going to be making wild changes or potentially stepping down.
That it coincided with a period of advertiser regression doesn't help.
I think we need to stop pretending that the only possible answer for seemingly misguided decisions is secret brilliance.
It's hyperbole. Tesla and SpaceX were insane accomplishments in moribund industries (the first successful auto startup in 80 years, and pretty much singlehanfedly revitalizing space travel which was basically dead, people with way more resources tried and failed at both of them). That being said, the Twitter acquisition is the work of a petulant child
The ball was already rolling on Tesla before Elon came along though. He was the majority of their first funding round but their company structure and development of a concept car was already underway. He just saw the opportunity that others were already working on and funded it, then stepped in, pushed the original founders out, and claimed it was his idea in the first place until he and the company settled a lawsuit in 2009.
SpaceX was truly his and he found great people to lead the company judging by their results. Contrary to your statement though, space travel wasn't dead at all. During the early SpaceX era when they launched zero rockets there were still a number of successful missions from organizations around the globe as well as routine commercial satellite launches. The key thing SpaceX did was cheapen launch costs to the point where existing launch companies had to start competing. This is down to the engineering achievements at SpaceX.
Musk is a face for businesses but if I were an investor in those other two ventures I'd definitely be concerned that this focus on Twitter is distracting him from his actual important work at those other companies, and I'd probably be pissed about what he's done to the share price of Telsa.
Musk had some pretty influential backing before he even founded SpaceX. From Wikipedia:
"In 2002, Griffin was President and COO of In-Q-Tel, a private enterprise funded by the CIA to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests. During this time, he met entrepreneur Elon Musk and accompanied him on a trip to Russia where they attempted to purchase ICBMs. The unsuccessful trip is credited as directly leading to the formation of SpaceX.[11] Griffin was an early advocate for Musk calling him a potential “Henry Ford for the rocket industry".[12]"
> The ball was already rolling on Tesla before Elon came along though.
You clearly have different sources from me (which are primarily Wikipedia).
My understanding was that Tesla did not have:
- Ownership of the Tesla brand
- Any real funding. During the Series A founding in 2004, Elon contributed $6.5M / $7.5 total.
- An actual car. During the development of the Roadster, Elon was both Chairman and Architect/CTO.
- Employees, beyond Eberhard and Tarpenning.
Before Elon, Tesla seems to have been only one of many early stage electric car startups with poor prospects for their future.
As for the developments around 2008, it becomes speculation who is telling the more true story between Musk and Eberhard. But as for what both have achieved elsewhere, it seems to me that Musk is also more effective as CEO.
Maybe you have sources that can contradict the above.
You cite several bullet points that are directly contradicted by Wikipedia itself, when saying Wikipedia is your source:
- Ownership of the Tesla brand
vs Wikipedia[1]:
Tesla was founded (as Tesla Motors) on July 1, 2003, by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in San Carlos, California.
Where's your source that they didn't own the brand?
- Employees, beyond Eberhard and Tarpenning.
vs Wikipedia[1]:
Ian Wright was the third employee, joining a few months later.[2] The three went looking for venture capital (VC) funding in January 2004[2] and connected with Elon Musk, who contributed US$6.5 million of the initial (Series A) US$7.5 million[10] round of investment in February 2004 and became chairman of the board of directors.[2] Musk then appointed Eberhard as the CEO.
I'd like to say, this is just a strange thing to suggest is negative in the tech space; there's loads of companies that start off as a small group of people (or even solo) and grow once they have investment
- Any real funding. During the Series A founding in 2004, Elon contributed $6.5M / $7.5 total.
- An actual car. During the development of the Roadster, Elon was both Chairman and Architect/CTO.
I don't understand this argument. It basically says "before they sought funding they didn't have any funding", which is incredibly obvious and not a point? Was there something more you wanted to say here? Yeah, he was the money guy who invested in an existing company, which kind of reinforces the point that it was an existing company with something worth investing in *because he did and then he took the reins on direction*.
Similarly, "before they had funding, they didn't have any vehicles to show for it." A car is not software, to actually build a functioning vehicle takes quite a bit of time. It took Tesla two full years after his investment to demonstrate a prototype Roadster. Musk had left the CEO position when the first Roadsters started shipping.
From reading the original founders' thoughts about where they initially wanted to go, it seems that the company was going to be focused on automotive technology, with their cars being largely showcases for their technology, essentially the way Unreal engine used to be sold and the way the Doom games have been showcases for id's engines. They were not really setting out to be a mass-market automaker, is the gist I get from their various interviews. It's very possible that this was because they believed they couldn't disrupt the automotive market, feeling it was too entrenched, and Musk had the money to put that goal within reach.
He definitely reset Tesla's aim and the company demonstrated there was money to be made making EVs. He had a big part in it but a lot of the engineering work was courtesy of Lotus' engineering teams[2]. His main contribution appears to have been forcing the team to pursue carbon fiber and pushing them to make custom headlamps that met DOT standards, in spite of costs associated with both. Despite how Wikipedia words it, if you look at the source - [2] below - it makes the following mention about the headlights, for example:
Again, Elon pushed us to spend the considerable money necessary to develop custom (and DOT-compliant) headlights to make the front look great.
I think when people read in the Wikipedia article:
Eberhard acknowledged that Musk was the person who insisted from the beginning on a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer body and that Musk led design of components ranging from the power electronics module to the headlamps and other styling
The takeaway is that Elon actually designed the components himself. The wording is vague enough to obscure the types of design involved and to play into the "genius" narrative. From all the sources, it appears that he was a guiding influence on style and basic statements about features and materials, rather than actually sitting down and designing individual components.
As to this point:
As for the developments around 2008, it becomes speculation who is telling the more true story between Musk and Eberhard. But as for what both have achieved elsewhere, it seems to me that Musk is also more effective as CEO.
Billionaires make effective CEOs is the argument here? I mean, probably, yes, unless they inherited their billions. I think before Twitter he had proven himself capable, he did great work with SpaceX and Tesla in his role as CEO. It's important to keep in mind the context here: This is a thread in which FormerBandmate wrote "He is a genius at hardware".
> I don't understand this argument. It basically says "before they sought funding they didn't have any funding"
It was in reference to this:
>> The ball was already rolling on Tesla before Elon came along though.
In what way do you think "the ball was rolling" before Elon came along?
> They were not really setting out to be a mass-market automaker, is the gist I get from their various interviews. It's very possible that this was because they believed they couldn't disrupt the automotive market, feeling it was too entrenched, and Musk had the money to put that goal within reach.
In other words, Tesla as we know it today, is due to Elon.
> From all the sources, it appears that he was a guiding influence on style and basic statements about features and materials, rather than actually sitting down and designing individual components.
Well, I suppose he was clearly in charge of it, Kind of like Steve Jobs for the iPhone. Unlike Steve, though, Elon has a technical (physics) education and a background as a developer, so he had the ability to drill into more details than Steve.
> Billionaires make effective CEOs is the argument here?
Effective CEO's tend to become Billionaires, especially if they're owners/founders. Musk has done so twice, at the same time, in Tesla and SpaceX, while also playing a key role in the creation of several other companies.
And this empire was built from essentially nothing (a few thousand dollars from his father at some point). It's not like Musk was born a billionaire.
This is false. You should check the records as to what Tesla was before Musk and JB Straubel came on board, it wasn’t much. I highly doubt the company would have survived past the Roadster.
Do Kia (reborn in 1986), Tata, and Saleen not count as successful? Tesla has had an impressive rise, but it's not like nothing happened between 1923 and 2003 in the automotive industry.
I think most people do not consider enough the importance of timing.
EV cars have existed for more than a century and been tried out by many companies. They all failed to mark a significant dent in the market because batteries technologies weren't as advanced as now, and because regulations weren't as strict as they are now.
Tesla was founded right when at a crossing point when California and European Union emissions regulations started to be more and more stringent and efficient batteries affordable enough. Being an EV-only company it was granted a very generous loan from the US government. This is a kick start no small automotive company ever got.
Not saying Musk hasn't any part in how the development, manufacturing and sale process was done. He certainly is one of the first to make people accept and even pay to be beta testers of an unfinished product/vehicle.
"No one is purely a savior" is a truism. Elon Musk is not a savior for simpler reasons, like all the lying, cheating, and general mishegas he's responsible for.
> What tech people like Paul Graham and others were hoping was for Elon to apply his scientific first principles type of thinking that he demonstrated previously at SpaceX+Tesla to Twitter.
I wish one could take a step back and just see how ridiculous of a statement this is. There is nothing about Musk’s history and management style that is even remotely close to what could be called “scientific first principles type of thinking”. Musk’s management style is a bull in a china closet, he manages via personal vendettas, and he follows the marketing and hype first, delivery second product development cycle. See full self-driving, Cybertruck, Tesla robot, Tesla tunnel, and whatever else he’s promised over the years but never delivered on.
Edit: striking out comment about the Cybertruck’s airflow until I can find the article I read to back it up.
> There is nothing about Musk’s history and management style that is even remotely close to what could be called “scientific first principles type of thinking”.
Agreed. But the interesting question for me is: what are people seeing that they would mistake for that?
> what are people seeing that they would mistake for that?
Fascist dictators are often "the weak person's idea how a strong person would look like". That means they are not strong in the sense that they have discipline, can carry a lot for other people, can defend their values etc. They are strong because they act strong.
Similar to that Musk is the mediocre person's idea of what a really smart person would look like. He managed to convince quite some people — even very intelligent ones — that he is an actual genius.
They wanted it to be true, so they ignored all the red flags. Replacing a train in a tunnel with a tunnel full of Teslas? Surely might look like the future, unless you have just a slight understanding of engineering, physics and safety rules. A scientific first principle would quickly let you optimise this: a fixed route? Rails are more efficient than rubber wheels, so put the Teslas on rails. Moving the batteries around is inefficient and a fire hazard, so let's move them out of the cars and replace them with the elctrical grid. The cars are bad at taking many passengers, replace them by fewer, bigger cars. So: trains.
If you apply the "scientific" method you would not end up with the stuff Elon does like.
You know what Elon Musk is? It is flying cars. Everybody who didn't think them through at least for a minute thinks they are the future. Why? Because they look like they are the future. I loved these illustrations as a kid and I bet Elon did too. The problem is just that they make no sense in the real world.
Elon Musk has an exceptional sensitivity in identifying products and solutions that look like the future. He has a very bad sense of going for actual good, efficient, workable solutions that make sense. Of anything really good comes up, it almost always seems to be despite him, not because he was involved.
The touch screens in the Teslas are another example. Looks like the future, while being less usable than what we had in the 90s. All the good ("boring") EV stuff in Tesla comes from actual good engineers who, you guessed it, apply the scientific method.
If anything the guy has shown some remarkable ability to change his mind once he realized his bad decisions have been bad. But how much of that was pressure from actually responsible, intelligent people is hard to tell.
I have no idea other than cult of personality. People really seem to take people like Musk and Trump at face value, as if their comments, philosophies, beliefs, positions, etc. are thoughtful things they stand behind and something more than what they really are: mouthpieces to shape what they want at a particular moment or to just blatantly confuse people. It’s a tactic out of Russia’s political playbook. I highly recommend Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalization.
Trump, Musk, Thatcher. All they have to do is tell them what they want to hear and throngs of unwashed masses, filled with their insecurities and fear, will worship at their feet.
"All you have to do is support me and I'll make everything allright" - any of the above
I am often reminded of the brilliant line from “The second Coming” by WB Yeats.[1]
“The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity”
Normal people are often full of doubt, their comments are often guarded by caveats etc. Dictators, populists, narcissists, confidence tricksters speak in absolutes. Their messages are very appealing because they seem so clear and straightforward. They can seem brilliant because of this certainty and sometimes can achieve a lot because they aren’t held back by the kinds of reservations and scruples that most people suffer from.
Seemed like you were comparing Elon Musk and Paul Graham's ways of thinking.
I was going in your direction by saying that Paul Graham and Elon Musk have very different personas; to the point that Graham got banned because he wasn't happy with Elon's choices.
No, I was commenting on Elon supposedly having a scientific principles first thinking. I guess people assume Paul Graham does, too? I haven’t seen that either, and have been underwhelmed with basically anything I see coming from the VC corners.
No, I did not. I read it recently when searching for turbulence, not even searching for the Cybertruck. I’ll try and find the article again. The article you posted doesn’t say anything though and refers to a Reddit post that isn’t even linked, that I could find.
I appreciate that. I don't think looking at the truck is sufficient to conclude that it is an inefficient airflow design. Especially because many parts of the design appear to be there to improve airflow compared to a normal truck – like the tonneau cover. Also, all of Tesla's other cars have quite good coefficients of drag.
Trump did an interview recently where he openly admitted that the airodynamics of the Cybertruck was not very good, even if it's better than most trucks. (Trucks are generally not designed with aerodynamics as the highest priority.)
My understanding is that the design is a mix of aesthetics and to keep production costs down.
My pet theory is that the cybertuck is just an excuse to start prototyping a future martian ground transport, in which case atmospheric drag may be less of a concern.
My pet theory is that Elon Musk's talk about colonizing Mars is a recruiting ploy, allowing him to hire top tier rocket scientists relatively cheap because they believe in the mission.
What do you figure is the real motivation for SpaceX if not Mars? I think it’s a much worse business than Tesla if you don’t care about the SpaceX mission. Seems to be barely viable financially, while Tesla has healthy margins. Musk has used his Tesla wealth to support SpaceX, which makes him seem more like a believer to me.
SpaceX probably has a more or less guaranteed future as part of the military-industrial complex, and I think it's very likely that's Musk's actual vision - inroads into becoming the next Lockheed-Martin.
Remember that one of the very first Tesla investors, Mike Griffin, since way before a rocket engine had even fired, later became Trump's Undersecretary of R&D, and had previously been a high-ranking scientist of the Star Wars satellite missile defense program (and head of NASA).
Commercial launch provider. And particularly cornering the market for DoD launches, probably because he thinks that leverage will make him politically untouchable.
> Seems to be barely viable financially
They're betting big on reusable rockets, and so far it seems to be paying off. If they succeed in getting a fully reusable rocket flying several times a week, as they claim they can, the no other launch provider will be able to compete.
I can scarcely believe you are holding up Murdoch as a paragon of impartiality. His newspapers are notoriously biased and scurrilous, and actively try to influence political outcomes. He doesn’t have to intervene much because he makes sure to hire people who will enact his will.
But he doesn't publicly (where the correct people can hear him, not his propaganda rags these people don't ever lay their marxist eyes upon) say mean things about the current insanity, therefore he must be good!
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
We can reasonably take the comment along the lines of "even Murdoch didn't step in in this potentially harmful scenario." It doesn't necessarily hold him up as a paragon of impartiality overall.
> Best thing Elon should have done was to focus only on the technical aspects of Twitter
The problem with this is that Twitter didn't have any technical problems that it needed Musk to solve. "Bots" were not a major problem for day-to-day usage. What it needed was a product vision to reach sustainable profitability. Not a huge amount of additional debt, massive internal disruption, and a catastrophic reputational collapse.
> Hopefully, Elon notices that we don't have endless HN and reddit front page articles about Rupert Murdoch's jet.
Are you kidding? He loves the attention, and we are only talking about Twitter because Elon bought it rather than some boring guy.
I still don't see the impending death of Twitter. Where is the evidence that it is going down the tubes? PG will be back, because everything bad about Twitter is even worse on Mastodon -- instead of one narcissistic Napoleon running things like Twitter, Mastodon has hundreds of them, and they are even less accountable than Elon.
If you want to kill Twitter, stopping giving it free publicity would be a good start. But you can't help yourselves, so it survives and thrives on your outrage.
You aren't wrong in some senses, but I think you're wrong in the most important sense: Twitter's servers run on electricity, and electricity is paid for with ads and MAUs, not outrage on HN (and other tech forums).
Servers are not that expensive, especially not when people are going to Twitter because they are outraged and seeing all the ads, and others are paying $8 per month.
Whether or not that works out is not something I can predict, but having more user engagement than ever before is not a bad thing for a platform that makes literally every penny from exploiting user engagement in some way.
Expensive enough to try and shirk the bills, it seems[1].
I would say that 95% of my professional circle was on Twitter 3 months ago. Today, it feels like less than 50%. Of that same circle, I only know one who paid $8 for Twitter Blue, and he canceled this month.
Outrage-driven engagement is definitely happening. But it needs to happen on Twitter, and in a way that doesn't threaten Twitter's ad sales, for it to be of any value to Twitter.
> Mr. Davis, the president of the Boring Company, has also directed Twitter employees to renegotiate the deals that the company has with firms such as Amazon and Oracle, which provide computing and tech services, the people said. The employees were told to suggest to those companies that Mr. Musk’s firms would not work with them in the future if they refused to renegotiate, the people said.
Twitter has their own datacenters, so this is likely to be peripheral. But we do know they've fired the majority of the staff actually operating those datacenters.
*Speculation on my part* I think that's why Elon did the poll about stepping down. He probably went to Qatar for the World Cup final not just as a spectator but also looking to sell more shares. His poll was a result of the Saudis not being interested. He'll back away and let Twitter go into bankruptcy under someone else.
Murdoch has been near single handedly the force that moved western news media and set us on the path we see today.
Many would happily dance on his grave, and raise a toast to his departure from this realm.
To say that he has a hands off approach to his editorial board, because of his handling of Theranos, is an unkindness to the harm he has caused to the fabric of decent society.
If any lesson is to be learned from Murdoch’s, it would be on silencing detractors, and holding the levers of political power.
The first world had the resources to fight issues of speech/civil liberties and courts which were not utterly corrupt.
The impact of Murdoch’s success in the hardest environment available, has been the long ringing death knell of many ideas we hold as intrinsic to civilized society.
The fact that Rupert Murdoch’s model worked, has not been lost on hundreds of tyrants around the world.
You're right that this raises questions about the nature of "first principles thinking". For Elon at Twitter, this seems to mean just applying hunches from Y2k era tech memories rather than understanding things like if you cut off huge IP ranges to fight 'bots' you'll affect legit users, etc
At the time, yishan drew a ton of criticism, but now what has happened at Twitter dwarfs that story.
Recall that yishan was also from the Paypal mafia and had early experience at facebook. Yet was unable to make things work. Important for any of the current would-be Twitter investors to ponder.
Like elon or not it makes absolutely no sense to compare social media with effectively newspapers, they're completely different things.
The only comparison I guess you could realistically have is zuckerberg, but even then it wouldn't work very well.
But we don't have endless front page articles about those other people because those are other people.
Musk knows in his heart of hearts that he is the most interesting and newsworthy person on the planet, so it makes sense the front page articles are about him.
He’s interesting because he does things we don’t expect, for good and bad.
The problem is right now he’s driving so much bad publicity. He’s engaged in one of the worst LBOs in modern history. He’s had a shambolic takeover (even in the realm of fire sales where firing everyone is the plan), he’s set his credibility on fire with his customers, he’s shown himself as terminally thin skinned, and he’s made a mockery of his supposed principles.
If he went back to pushing the state of normal on electric cars and space flight that would be covered, but he doesn’t seem capable of it currently.
Yeah. I find him interesting because he's a loser. Someone who failed upward and lacks the intelligence he believes he has to have any self awareness or human decency.
If someone on HN pooped on Elon's desk, I'd find that compelling to look into. It wouldn't be interesting in a positive way though. That's what the parent comment was implying.
"Best thing Elon should have done was to focus only on the technical aspects of Twitter and let some more level-headed less-emotional people manage the editorial aspects."
Almost everything in your comment is highly likely to be wrong, simply because of one fundamental difference between WaPo/WSJ and Twitter: Twitter contributors are not employees.
Stating unilaterally that Bezos & Murdoch exert no influence over the content of their publications can't be grounded in any fact because any potential influence they might exert would never be public knowledge. It's falsifiable (as many commenters have done with Murdoch) but it's not provable. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence Bezos does too: it will probably remain circumstantial since he is in a position to keep it that way.
Twitter content being crowdsourced means that Musk as owner has far less direct influence. All he can really do is censor, which is exactly what we've seen play out.
But that's solely because media has always been a drug (clickbaits, cognitive tricks, etc.) serving as a power tool. The ones you mentioned, including HN belong one way or another to a "Democratic" party. And all these billionaires, well, they chose their side (as all billionaires do when it comes to power and politics) and we have what we have (i.e. "democratic" media not discussing "republican-leaning" billionaires' jets).
I think, in his own way Elon, is trying to apply his engineering first principles. AFAIK, his #1 rule is "The best part is no part", which I think explains a fair number of his (non-ego driven) choices.
> Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone and let the editors run it. What Jeff did do was invest some money into the IT department to modernize the workflow tools (metrics dashboards, etc) for journalists. He stayed out of the decisions of what stories get run on the front page.
> Any time I speak or write about Omidyar, the proverbial elephant in the room is my own extensive involvement with him: specifically, the fact that the journalistic outlet I co-founded in 2013, and at which I worked for eight years, was funded almost entirely by him. For purposes of basic journalistic disclosure, but also to explain how my interaction with him informs my perspective on these issues, I will describe that experience and what I learned from it.
> When I left the Guardian in 2013 at the height of the Snowden/NSA reporting to co-found a new media outlet along with two other journalists, it was Omidyar who funded the project, which ultimately became The Intercept, along with its parent corporation, First Look Media. Our unconditional demand when deciding to accept funding from Omidyar was that he vow never to have any role whatsoever or attempt to interfere in any way in the editorial content of our reporting, no matter how much he disagreed with it or how distasteful he found it. He not only agreed to this condition but emphasized that he, too, believed the integrity of the new journalism project depended upon our enjoying full editorial freedom and independence from his influence.
> In the eight years I spent at The Intercept, Omidyar completely kept his word. There was never a single occasion, at least to my knowledge, when he attempted to interfere in or override our journalistic independence.
> For the first couple of years, adhering to that promise was easy: [...] our journalism and Omidyar's worldview were fully aligned
> The arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene in 2015 changed all of that, and did so quite dramatically.
> the Trump-centric worldview that I spent most of my time attacking and mocking on every platform I had — in speeches, interviews, podcasts, social media and in countless articles at The Intercept — was the exact political worldview to which Omidyar had completely devoted himself and was passionately and vocally advocating.
> The radical divergence between my worldview and Omidyar's did not end there.
> This extreme divergence between my public profile and Omidyar's core views expanded for years. Often Omidyar would promote and herald a view on Twitter in the morning, and I would then publish an article on The Intercept attacking that same view in the afternoon, and then go on television that night to attack it some more.
> It was an irresistible story to journalists: at the time, I was the most prominent and the highest-paid journalist associated with The Intercept, which relied almost entirely on Omidyar's annual multi-million dollar largesse, and yet my primary political and journalistic focus at The Intercept was tantamount to a war on Omidyar's most cherished political beliefs and core objectives.
> On at least two occasions, journalists with major outlets contacted each of us to let us know they wanted to write about this glaring split. Yet neither ended up doing so for a simple reason: Omidyar made it emphatically clear that I had the absolute right to express whatever views I wanted, and that my doing so would never create a problem with him, let alone cause him to rethink his funding of The Intercept.
> Omidyar told me privately on both occasions that he knew when he decided to fund The Intercept that the day would come, likely soon, when not just me but other journalists there would be publishing articles with which he vehemently disagreed or even undermined his other interests. When he decided to fund The Intercept, he told me, he was supporting independent journalism, not promoting a particular ideology or political agenda. And indeed, no matter how much my attacks escalated on his core beliefs and the other groups he was heavily funding — and escalate they did! — I never received any remote signal that my outspoken journalism and commentary were imperiling his ongoing funding of The Intercept.
> I recount all of that for two reasons. First, I want to make clear that my analysis of Omidyar's role in this scam Facebook "whistleblower” campaign and the dangers it presents is in no way motivated by personal animus toward him.
> But the second point is the more important one. When it comes to billionaire funders of political and journalistic projects, Omidyar — despite the long list of political views and activities of his that I regard as misguided or even toxic — is, for the reasons I just outlined, as good as it gets. And yet despite all that, it is simply unavoidable — inevitable — that the ideology, views and political agenda of a billionaire funder will end up contaminating and dominating any project for which they are the exclusive or primary funder. Omidyar is not some apolitical or neutral guardian of good internet governance; he is a highly politicized and ideological actor with very strong views on society's most debated questions.
> To understand the dangers of a small group of billionaires funding campaigns like this [...] put yourself in the place of senior editors of The Intercept. Despite Omidayr's genuine affirmation of editorial independence, they live in complete captivity to, and fear of, Omidyar's whims and preferences.
> As is true of so many billionaire-funded NGOs and “non-profits,” editors and senior writers at The Intercept receive gigantic, well-above-the-market salaries. Because the site depends almost entirely on Omidyar's infinite wealth, it does not sell any subscriptions or ads and it therefore does not have any pressure to produce at all in order to generate revenue. It is a dream job for most of them: enormous salaries, endless expense accounts, a complete lack of job requirements, and no need even to attract an audience. For years, outside of three or four journalists, articles published by The Intercept produce almost no traffic.
> It does not get better than that, and that is why almost nobody ever quits The Intercept. Why would they? They just stay for years and years, collecting a huge salary, with no need to do anything but avoid angering one man. They work in an industry where jobs disappear with astonishing frequency, where layoffs are the norm, where the very existence of most organizations is precarious, and where the slightest dissent from liberal orthodoxies can render someone permanently unemployable. Those who work in outlets funded by billionaires have essentially won a type of lottery, at least temporarily, and very few people are willing to risk losing a winning lottery ticket, especially if they know they have no alternatives
> That means that the entire news organization has a constituency of one: Pierre Omidyar. If you were an Intercept editor who knows you could never get anywhere near that high salary working anywhere else — and that is true for virtually the entire senior editorial staff at The Intercept other than its Washington Bureau Chief Ryan Grim — you will of course be desperate to keep the sinecure going. That is not really corrupt as much as it is just basic self-preservation. If remaining in Omidyar's good graces is the only way to pay your large mortgage and maintain your lifestyle — which is true for most of them — then that will be all you ever think or care about.
> Consider the power that bestows on Omidyar in the lives of those dependent on him.
> They wake up knowing every day that one man has the power, on a whim, to destroy their livelihood. That desperate dynamic produces a climate where catering one's worldview and work product to Omidyar's ideological preferences becomes the overarching imperative. The only thing that matters to them in their work is keeping their sole benefactor happy and avoiding his wrath.
> I want to avoid the caricature here. This need to please Omidyar is often more subliminal than conscious. There are numerous journalists who work at The Intercept who do great work and rarely think about Omidyar in any conscious or direct way.
> But the inescapable reality is that the senior editorial management absolutely knows that their only real job is to foster a climate that will keep Omidyar happy, which means only hiring or publishing voices that will not offend him, ensuring that The Intercept's political and journalistic posture is aligned with his ideological worldview and, most of all, prohibiting anyone or any journalism from remaining at The Intercept if it strays too far from Omidyar's political project.
-----
When the owner is ideologically committed above all else to not interfering with what his organization publishes, when he makes repeated public statements to that effect and demonstrates his sincerity over and over and over again, the result is that the organization adheres slavishly to every quirk of the owner's beliefs, and devotes all its effort to bringing itself into line and expelling anyone who might think differently.
Jeff Bezos is part of every decision about what gets run on the front page of the Washington Post, whether he'd like that to be true or not.
Thank you for posting that, it is a very interesting viewpoint. I do think there is a bit of an inconsistency in Greenwald's reasoning though, he can't really speak for his colleagues, but he can speak for himself. So maybe he's not so much talking about his colleagues at the end as he is talking about himself? Or does he see himself as more principled than they are?
He's writing about how he ended up being forced out of his own media outlet (his words; he was co-founder).
If he sees himself as more principled than they are, I would argue that the sequence of events he describes is sufficient justification for that view. It might not be, in a deep sense, true -- you could easily interpret him as being less afraid of losing a well-paid sinecure than the rest of the editorial board, as opposed to being more strongly attached to his own principles -- but it is true on the surface and it's an accusation he can fairly lodge. They caved; he didn't.
> the intended core innovation of The Intercept, above all else, was to create a new media outlets where all talented, responsible journalists would enjoy the same right of editorial freedom I had always insisted upon for myself.
> The current iteration of The Intercept is completely unrecognizable when compared to that original vision. Rather than offering a venue for airing dissent, marginalized voices and unheard perspectives, it is rapidly becoming just another media outlet with mandated ideological and partisan loyalties
> the brute censorship this week of my article — about the Hunter Biden materials and Joe Biden’s conduct regarding Ukraine and China, as well my critique of the media’s rank-closing attempt, in a deeply unholy union with Silicon Valley and the “intelligence community,” to suppress its revelations — eroded the last justification I could cling to for staying. It meant that not only does this media outlet not provide the editorial freedom to other journalists, as I had so hopefully envisioned seven years ago, but now no longer even provides it to me. In the days heading into a presidential election, I am somehow silenced from expressing any views that random editors in New York find disagreeable, and now somehow have to conform my writing and reporting to cater to their partisan desires and eagerness to elect specific candidates.
> To say that such censorship is a red line for me, a situation I would never accept no matter the cost, is an understatement. It is astonishing to me, but also a reflection of our current discourse and illiberal media environment, that I have been silenced about Joe Biden by my own media outlet.
I have been following that around the time that it happened and one thing that struck me is that Greenwald had been losing the plot, his subsequent writings have - so far - confirmed that for me so I'm not quite sure I buy all of his reasonings but I wasn't aware of the exact interplay between him and the financiers.
Do you happen to know what Greenwald thinks about public broadcasters like Britain's BBC? His description of "unconscious allegiance" to the source of income is one of the most succinct summaries of the peculiar mindsets that those systems too seem to foster.
If you go back to Musk deal, it was immediately after Babylon bee was banned for an anti trans remark about man of the year.
I'm speculating a bit, and I'm not supporting his actions, I'm trying to explain then. I think he already had disagreement with his son that came out as trans later, and I think the major reason he changed his political position is because of his child. The child also cut all ties with him.
He said "The woke mind virus must be destroyed, nothing else matters".
It's not Elon the entrepreneur, or Elon the management genius, or even Elon the troll on social media.
What's really driving him is Elon the father that views leftism and woke as a mind virus that had possessed his child.
When you reach that position as a father, there's no loyalty to old political parties, there's no choosing words carefully or looking at Twitter as a regular business.
This is a person who could not care much about ideology until ideology reached his house and destroyed it - and only at that point he actually started fighting the fight.
He treats Twitter and leftists as the enemies because in his mind they are enemies, enemies that managed to destroy his child. It might seem inconceivable that someone might change his position so radically, and surprise everyone, but that's because they don't understand the real motivation.
Anyway, I'm not supporting his actions, this is meant to empathize with him so I'll understand what's going on and where all this is coming from, and therefore, where is it going.
> This is a person who could not care much about ideology until ideology reached his house and destroyed it
I think this is made all the more powerful by being imaginary: if there really was some organized group he'd at least have some way of knowing who’s in it or what they do. Since it’s basically a conspiracy theory driven by not wanting to consider what he could have done differently, there’s nothing falsifiable, he can find signs of it almost anywhere, and anyone who tries to talk him out of it is suddenly a traitor. Since his son was trans, there’s an entire preexisting opposition group all ready to provide reassurance any time his faith wavers, too.
He should sit down with some conservative Christian parents and ask them if the culture wars un-gay’d their children.
Anyway I’m not inclined to believe this given that he’s cozied up to people who are openly hostile to trans people (calling them groomers etc) rather than “Trans people deserve our love and support but actually are just confused we can fix them!”
According to my search Musk has 10 kids. According to him he works something like 18 hours a day. He seems to maybe spend a lot of his time browsing and using Twitter.
>I'm speculating a bit, and I'm not supporting his actions, I'm trying to explain then. I think he already had disagreement with his son that came out as trans later, and I think the major reason he changed his political position is because of his child. The child also cut all ties with him.
Maybe, but I find it more likely that his child cut ties with him because he was always fucking awful.
That's probably the child's perspective, and not one that Musk shares. He will prefer to reject the idea that he was always fucking awful, and instead prefers the idea that his child was taken from him by a "woke mind virus".
> What's really driving him is Elon the father that views leftism and woke as a mind virus that had possessed his child.
I don't think this is his motivation, because if it was, this isn't how he'd go about doing it. I mean, maybe it is - but if so, he's doing a lousy job affecting any kind of change in his child. I suppose that's on brand for him.
Personally I think he doesn't give a fuck about anything because $$ and just does whatever comes to mind (cf. his twitter poll about stepping down).
That's maybe not how you would react. But it's a classical response - when under attack, identify enemies, and attack back.
It takes a certain kind of social intellect to understand which actions will actually psychologically affect someone for the better.
Does he consciously tie his actions directly to this? Or is it indirectly, by getting very negative emotions and associations to leftism, which are then turned into this culture war?
Well yeah, duh. Of course people can do what they want. Criticizing Musk's (or anybodies) actions is not tantamount to trying to say he shouldn't be allowed to do them (except for the stuff he actually shouldn't be allowed to do, and hopefully gets prosecuted for - mostly violating employment law).
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here? People should vote with their wallets/service usage but never ever discuss why? Public figures should be able to do whatever they want with no criticism?
I just find it ironic how the sides have swapped. Previously when Twitter was censoring right-wing opinions, leftists went “it's a private company, they can do whatever they want and you're not allowed to criticize them”. Now that Musk has taken over, it seems to be the opposite.
What leftist did that? Leftists don’t believe in private for profit corporations. It’d be weird for them to care about capital ownership all of a sudden.
When was Twitter censoring “right wing opinion”. Do you mean bigotry?
Franklin Veaux (a famous writer on Quora), for example.
> Leftists don’t believe in private for profit corporations. It’d be weird for them to care about capital ownership all of a sudden.
That's what I find the most perplexing about it.
> When was Twitter censoring “right wing opinion”.
Specifically, it was applying different rules to different groups. For example, hateful posts about white people were allowed, whereas hateful posts about black people were not.
Example of a hateful post of a white person? I highly doubt this is true. Do you believe calling a white person cracker is hate? Funnily enough, leftist and actually famous (in streaming + political circles) Hasan Piker, a white guy, got de-platformed temporarily because right wingers hate watched him and reported him for using cracker. Cracker comes from the whips cracking...because white people in America OWNED other human beings and still benefit from the systemic racism that is integrated into society.
> Franklin Veaux
I don't think Franklin Veaux is that big of a leftist. If at all. I spent a few min looking him up. I found a post talking about left and right politics. It is filled with inaccuracies and appears to be written by some one who consumes the most basic of news and politics. Here: https://blog.franklinveaux.com/2022/06/7985/
He equates liberals and the left. He doesn't seem to understand what liberal means. This is politics 101. He says "Liberals don’t accept this. Liberals are biased toward egalitarianism; the same rules apply to everybody." This isn't true. By definition liberals believe in capitalism. Capitalism by definition is not "the same rules apply to everybody". The blog post seems more like anti-leftist propaganda. Making liberals seem like they are on the left is so wrong.
Unless you have some evidence that not only shows he's a leftist (a socialist), but can answer why he made such a bad blog post and still keeps it up, he's probably a full blown liberal.
Franklin is left-wing in the modern sense, which is more about social politics than distribution of money. I didn't mean to imply that he was a socialist. Sorry for the confusion.
Franklin would probably be offended like you with your example. Classic lib take.
(A) You incorrectly insulted leftists. (B) You used Franklin, a huge liberal (like yourself), to make your point. Franklin knows jack shit about politics. (C) You incorrectly stated leftist in the modern sense means liberal. I’m American. I know there’s a world outside the right-wing brain rotted USA. (D) You incorrectly stated modern leftism is more about social politics.
The control of the means of production and thus surplus value going to capitalists vs workers is Capitalism 101.
The analogue of the GOP are the Torys in the UK and the Liberal Party in AU. They are huge liberals. Reagan and the Tory leader of the 80s, Thatcher, ushered in neoliberalism.
You should educate yourself before incorrectly insulting leftist ideology. You sound like a Ben Shapiro or Bill Maher NPC trying to “own the libs”. I shouldn’t have to teach you basic politics.
Well yeah, leaving is exactly what people are doing. Nobody I know is arguing he can't do whatever he wants with Twitter. But they are voting with their feet.
I'm not arguing anything. But even if I were, I don't know what "leverage" has to do with it.
Last time I checked this is a discussion forum where many people gather together to express thoughts and opinions about various topics that they may not have "leverage" to argue about.
He is not on speaking terms with his trans daughter and writes stuff about his pronouns and other silly stuff. He obviously isn’t liberal in the way he and the article are using liberal.
The original version of that has the right moving to the extreme right while the left stays in place. I guess both sides feel that the gap has grown, but both sides blame the other side.
Before we descend into both-sideism, though, it's worth to get a bit more perspective: the left-wing version of the comic looks at the growing divide over a period of decades; just after WW2, social democracy was strong in the US. Support for unions was strong, workers' rights, social security, all sorts of social democratic programs were broadly supported. Only with Reagan, did the Republicans suddenly start moving to the right: lower taxes, end social programs, deregulation, privatisation. And in the 1990s, the Democrats followed them on that part; both the regulation of the banks that enabled the 2008 crash and the crime bill that gave the US the largest prison population in the world, happened on Clinton's watch.
So the left-wing version of the comic is absolutely correct, and people have started to push back, which may have inspired the right-wing version of the comic.
Except I've got the feeling that the right-wing version is about something completely different: the pronouns issue. And frankly, that's barely a left-right issue. It's got nothing to do with economic inequality. It's entirely possible to support economic equality yet oppose accepting transgender people as their target gender (see JK Rowling, for example), or to oppose economic equality yet support accepting transgender people (classic/economic/neo-liberalism, many corporations).
Politics is simply not the one-dimensional field that these comics suggest it is.
Wapo and wsj are becoming more and more irrelevant. Remember the Afghan collapse that happened over one week? Just read their coverage for months prior to that one week.
These are outdated legacy systems that don't have the impact they once did. So there is not much point to comparing how they operate with Twitter.
One thing interesting that's happening with Elon's polls is ppl will notice who runs polls about their own decisions. And that's a good thing.
So he can accomplish his mission of destroying Twitter for good, take down BlueSky and all the associated crypto crapware with it, and take down his own other businesses in the process.
Two birds with one stone:
1. The whole idea of social media owned by large private companies that make money out of ads and surveillance will get a big hit, and open ActivityPub-based social media can fill the void left by Twitter (like it should have happened already a decade ago). If only Zuckerberg could also make the same embarrassing mistakes that Musk is making...
2. This arrogant buffoon whose only talent is to exploit people will get out of the way for a while.
So go Elon. Hold on and stay on the sinking ship like a good captain. I'm enjoying both the show and the popcorn.
Every time he suspends a high profile Twitter account for posting Mastodon links (or, as he did recently, changes the T&Cs to explicitly "prohibit sharing Mastodon links"), we get a new spike of users and content on the Fediverse.
He's doing more to bring people to the Fediverse than years of enthusiasts trying to explain normal folks what an instance and an ActivityPub inbox are.
I operate under the assumption that most people are neither super geniuses nor dumbasses. Rather, if you shared their context, values, and goals, their decisions would be understandable, even if not agreeable. This isn't always the right framing, but I think it's a very useful default model.
The one thing I almost always discount is 5d chess.
For a second I thought you had written “5D-cheese.” And I really liked it. Because it more-readily conveys that there is no way the ‘higher level’ explanation is real.
Confidence men like Musk are brilliant in this respect at least: they can so bedazzle some segments that they are willing to reinterpret every possible outcome, no matter how obviously detrimental, as a secretly planned win, only under altered game rules. Cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails.
Totally agreed about BlueSky and all the crypto-related nonsense needing to go, but thinking that ActivityPub is the future is as naive as thinking the Linux desktop is the future.
There are significant technical, scalability and user experience challenges with ActivityPub-based systems that people refuse to acknowledge and address. Some of those challenges may not even have a good solution - turns out there are also advantages to centralisation, and fixing social media toxicity doesn't necessarily require throwing the baby out with the bathwater and going all-in on a decentralised solution.
I agree on the user experience challenges - although I don't think they are more insurmountable than several of the technical decisions taken by Twitter.
On the technical and scalability side, what challenges do you see? I personally see a distributed system of instances as something much more scalable than a centralized platform.
How can anyone, in 2022, still have this utopian vision about open social media? There will always be another "arrogant buffoon" to ruin it for you. It's more productive to change your attitude.
I think that the shift towards open protocols is just inevitable at some point. The ads-funded and surveillance-based business model is getting backlash both from users and regulators.
The EU's DMA is forcing giants to open up their platforms and APIs, which means opening up the walled gardens, which means that Twitter and Meta will no longer hold a monopoly on how their information is presented (i.e. there will be a blossoming of apps that deliver the content without all the spyware, which kicks surveillance capitalism directly in its bollocks).
Users are also becoming more sensitive about who stores their data and how it's used. As platforms become more aggressive about defending their profit margins, and start shovelling more ads down people's throats, more sponsored results and deploy more trackers, people are actually starting to quit those platforms and move somewhere else - a reversal of the network effects that made these platforms' popularity about 10-15 years ago.
I really believe that within 5-10 years the idea of using a closed, proprietary and surveillance-based piece of software to stay in contact with your friends will sound as dumb as using proprietary and paid protocols for computer networking instead of TCP/IP, or some proprietary implementation of messaging instead of emails.
And every instance admin decides which relays they want their instance to participate to - therefore the content of which instances gets forwarded by default to the federated inbox.
Moderation tools are available on all three levels of the hierarchy: user-level, moderator-level and admin-level.
As a user, you can mute reposts from certain users, report content to the mods (both of your own instance or of the instance of the offending user), mute or block users, hashtags, or entire instances.
As a mod, you have all the tools above, plus the ability to mute/block content on an instance level.
As an admin, you have all the tools above, plus the ability to block content from entire instances (what is called "defederate"), as well as control which relays forward content to the federated timeline.
And there's also an additional (often underestimated) layer of control through federation relays, whose job is to accept or reject requests of federation from other instances.
So you have much more granular and scalable tools for moderation when compared to a centralized platforms. Individual instances can also decide to target a certain type of users or topics, and therefore can be more restrictive on what content gets forwarded to them, while others can be more general-purpose, and users can decide which ones they want to join on the basis of what experience they want by default, while not losing the ability to follow whoever they like on any instance.
And, since individual instances are usually much smaller than a centralized social network, admins and mods have a much easier task moderating them. And it's also in their interest to do so: if things go too rogue on an instance and mods don't intervene, then other instances may decide to defederate the rogue node - with the consequence that the content generated by that instance will not reach other instances.
To me this sounds like a much more granular and scalable way of moderating a social network.
I would love to see this poll go "no", though I suspect that he would step down anyway. He probably already had a replacement in mind before he posted the poll.
I mean he deleted and redid his last two polls when the answer he didn't like won, so I'm not sure why anyone would expect this to go differently. If it's an overwhelming yes vote, he'll delete it I think.
That’s pretty funny, considering that he could just make the results say whatever he wants. (Or you’re fired, last-remaining poll engineer. If you still exist.)
What is the "crypto crapware" specifically you are referring to in the BlueSky project? There is no blockchain or token associated, though they are using DIDs to sign each post as well as standard asymmetric key encryption with the browsers WebCrypto API. https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/blob/main/packages...
I think he only posts polls when he believes he knows the outcome already. Yesterday he posted a poll about unsuspending the journalist accounts and when the outcome wasn't what he wanted instead of following the majority vote he posted it again with different options (with the same result, which he did abide by the second time).
I think this indicates he's tired of Twitter already. But he still owns it, so who will he put in his place? Or maybe he is expecting a landslide "no" result?
It seems like it would be the smart move to hire someone with expertise in social media, give them his high-level vision, and let them implement the details. The last few weeks of Elon's micromanagement have been a complete shitshow.
Whatever you think about removing Elon as head of Twitter, whether you believe that to be smart or not, this is just not how you go about making decisions as a leader.
Think of it this way, will Elon be conducting a new poll on whether or not to fire his replacement in a year's time? (Because that's what this type of decision making process leads to.)
This is not sustainable because it does not bring any sort of stability.
Most self-proclaimed "experts in social media" seem to be responsible for making it the disaster that it is for our societies.
The one thing that has definitely been refreshing about new Twitter is that the leader isn't yet another "social media expert" and just another social media user with similar complaints as millions of other users.
Personally I really hope they also get rid of the "UX experts" next, given how shit Twitter's UX is, especially on anything that isn't a phone.
The problem is that people who want to do social media will become what they hate, because of the very real constraints which people learn about quickly once they're actually steering the ship. Very few social media places don't suck, and it takes a pretty heavy hand to keep things from going completely to hell. The two places I know which aren't hives of scum and villainy are HN and Metafilter; both are heavily moderated, text only, and basically ad free.
I feel like to an extent that is the usual response to any sort of attempt at disruption.
For example, prior to Falcon 9 the argument used to be that SpaceX too would have to either succumb to relying on expensive cost-plus contracts or go bust like all other space companies before them. Yet, as they pushed up against that attitude and tried their own approach, they became successful and set the model that has now led to hundreds of new private space companies. Similarly, the argument against reusing F9 was that it wouldn't fly often enough to pay for reuse.
Thus I think that it isn't too crazy to consider that maybe with all this fiddling around they might stumble upon a more healthy model for social media for their scale. Especially considering that this environment of a large platform with an existing userbase undergoing said change is very unique (in that most other attempts at healthier social media have failed in part due to not being able to rely on pre-existing network effects).
Maybe they'll still fail, but I think it's still worth trying (even if it kills Twitter) rather than just appointing another 'expert' to continue to make things worse. Especially because it isn't my own money on the line :)
It certainly would be a fun experiment. But the dynamics are so quite different from what he usually deals with.
Lets start with employees... both Tesla and especially SpaceX had hordes of people wanting to work there. I don't currently see the same for Twitter, and Elon just removed a bunch of talent.
Customers are also widely different. Tesla were enthusiasts willing to overlook drawbacks and oopsies. SpaceX was few high value ones like NASA, and by now have a great track record, not to mention the price. Instead of believers in the company mission, many twitter users are just average people. They will complain. They might leave due to drastic changes. Sure, there is a strong network effect. But Musk payed a lot of money for that, should he really risk it all?
>Lets start with employees... both Tesla and especially SpaceX had hordes of people wanting to work there. I don't currently see the same for Twitter, and Elon just removed a bunch of talent.
I don't know of anyone who is clamoring to work for Twitter now but the people he fired definitely don't seem like the type you're describing either. I think he views the majority of Twitter to be inmates running the asylum.
The real question is will he be able to find replacements that share his vision/passion for Twitter like he did with those companies. Twitter seems a lot less prestigious than SpaceX or Tesla.
Does he even have a high level vision beyond generating a reaction?
(The "free speech platform" sounded like a vision, but we wouldn't have new banning offences every five minutes if that had been a serious consideration rather than something he said for the likes)
His high level vision was to create "X the everything app" in the style of mega-apps offered by Chinese tech giants. Not only does this vision require clearing massive regulatory hurdles, secure immense amount of capital funding, and acquire/build a highly diversified portofolio of companies covering multiple unrelated consumer sectors, there's probably nobody willing or capable to take that job.
It's fun to think about until you realize building the company/service portofolio that can support a mega-app would almost certainly attract ire from regulators even within the U.S., ignoring the amount of capital investment required to achieve it.
Plus, Uber/Spotify/Doordash/Yelp can barely turn a profit as-is. What incentives will the everything app offer to pull consumers away from these existing competitors other than subsidizing the services with VC money, which would only worsen profitability and sustainability?
Let's imagine Google Cloud, AWS, Azure are resp. Google's / Amazon's / Microsoft's everything apps. They are managing to handle the regulatory weight of supporting applications of all kinds of nature, and if you rethink Twitter as a platform you can do the same as well.
Many things are possible, and the Twitter app today may even continue to work as-is. But underneath it will be able to power more apps and more use cases, all tied under a common cohesive set of interactive primitives, much higher level than what cloud applications today support. This means less to reinvent, less to rediscover, and easier more natural integration between apps, services and components.
It'd be a lot of work, definitely not a 2-3 month project. So you'd need also a survival strategy that keeps Twitter 1.0 working and profitable.
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft absolutely do not have "everything" apps. Google Maps is the closest to a mega-app and it's still highly focused on things that are location-based.
These companies also don't favour their own services over others on their cloud platforms. That's why regulators aren't coming after them. Twitter is not a cloud service provider and it's not hard to see why the argument you presented does not hold up.
1. A general purpose computing platform is an everything app.
2. Cloud platforms and their APIs are a significant step towards moving higher-level in development platforms compared to, say, compiling a raw binary and running it on Linux.
3. Keep moving in that direction.
1. The "everything app" being talked about is essentially a Chinese tech giant mega-app, which are absolutely not general purpose computing platforms which are not "apps" themselves.
2. Agreed but this has nothing to do with Twitter or mega-apps whatsoever.
3. Transitioning to cloud service is not what Twitter needs to do right now even under the mega-app vision. And attempting so under their current situation is a sure fire way to actually go bankrupt.
His everything app idea is similar to WhatsApp yes, but he's had this idea from way back, when he got the X domain. The thing I'm describing is a long term vision, you need to first be profitable with the current platform before you start that.
Has he ever stated anywhere that his long term vision is a "general computing platform"? Because mega-apps are not that. There has been zero building happening or even hinted at towards his everything app vision while he is wrecking everything at Twitter.
He has compared Twitter to a neural network where we (and bots) are the nodes. I feel this was him mostly trying to sound fancy, but in my mind I'm absolutely gonna grab this and run with it.
Mega-app, the way I understand that term, is not what he's after. He's mentioned that he wants to allow HQ video and compete with YouTube and have a separate app which shows a YouTube-like view of only tweets with videos on them. Like a projection of that content, from the same platform.
Or alternatively you can see it as merely a "videos tab" in a single "mega-app", but this distinction is not quite substantial on a higher level, only about the logistics of marketing the app and maintaining it.
As for there being zero building happening... of course. He's trying to stop bleeding cash for now. I'm not suggesting he's working on this NOW.
Let's agree to disagree here because we are clearly not talking about the same things at all. I suggest reading up on what Chinese mega apps look like and Musk's personal comments that referred to WeChat. Adding longform video is exactly part of a conventional mega-app and it is absolutely not revolutionary whatsoever.
Haha, funny response, but I did say the details matter ;-)
I may be projecting my own ideas onto "everything". When Elon took over Twitter, I was inspired by his idea, and combined with concepts from some projects I'm working on, over two weeks or so, in my free time I wrote like 50+ pages of notes on what "Twitter 2.0" might be.
Is Elon's idea anything close to so comprehensive, I don't know. We only know he wanted payments in it, but this is barely scratching the surface of what Twitter could be.
Twitter's timeline of messages could be seen as a communication platform, computation platform, verified facts registry and so on. The rabbit hole is deep if you let your fantasy run wild.
I'm not sure it's meant to make him look good or bad as much as just say "What person who Elon would agree with, who also has an idea of how to run a social media/moderation business, would agree to work for him and implement his vision."
The problem with being someone with ideas outside of the rest of your community is that you generally can't find other people with complimentary skills who agree with you.
And I hate just about anyone you probably consider an experts “vision” on social media, especially since what it ended up becoming was a “”private”” end run around the 1st and 4th amendments.
It really is perfect, a not-government entity making wink-wink decisions at the behest of unelected executive branch employees.
- Level the playing field between the "blue-checks" and everyone else. I think the intent of that is to encourage the 90% of people who passively consume content to engage more, and encourage lurkers without accounts to sign up.
- Reduce the dependency on advertisers by pivoting to a model that is partly user-funded. Reddit seems to have had some success with this, for example.
- Signal that Twitter is going to be less politically partisan going forward, probably in an attempt to rope back in users who moved to right-wing Twitter clones.
I don't think those are objectively terrible ideas, but the implementation so far has been remarkably bad.
> ... probably in an attempt to rope back in users who moved to right-wing Twitter clones.
The problem with Twitter isn't free speech, but objective reality. There's only room for one reality on Twitter -- not two, or three, or four.
Truth Social and the right wing platforms don't challenge people's view that the 2020 election was a fraud, that pizza gate really happened, so they will probably continue now as they are.
For a lot of right-wing people I have spoken to, the Hunter Biden story getting falsely removed for "Russian disinformation" was the last straw. Think of it as a dumb scandal if you want, but the issue was a legitimate news story published by high-profile mainstream news outlets getting removed using counter-disinformation tools. That really damaged Twitter's credibility.
Now they would rather hang out on a site where they don't have to worry about overbearing moderation, at the cost of a handful of nutters talking about Satanic rituals or whatever. I think Musk had a plausible route to getting those users back if he could promise slightly more limited and fair enforcement of the rules.
Is it the fact they don't want anyone to question their belief system? Because that's what I see.
When they are questioned, they martyrize themselves to spark more outrage. (I'm a victim of the woke left!) And then use that as a crutch to deflect further criticism or questions.
If it wasn't Hunter Biden's Laptop, it would be something else, e.g. Pizzagate, Voting Machines, Mail-in Balloting, Fake school shootings, etc.
You can't blame the mainstream media if you're the one that's calling "wolf" over and over without facts.
I don't really think that's the case. We can see the dynamic in action on the Fediverse, a space where anyone can make their own server and moderate it according to their wishes. There are right-wing servers that have created their own walled gardens (Gab, Truth Social), but at the same time the left-wing servers have created server blacklists that include most of the "free speech" servers. Given the option, a lot of people across the political spectrum apparently want hugboxes.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen on the left as well. I'm just saying it's easier to recognize when it does happen on the right. The Dominion v. Fox News lawsuits come to mind here. Parents of Sandy Hook v. Alex Jones, too.
Back around 1991/1992 the Democrats in congress were so convinced there was an October Surprise in the 1980 election. There just wasn't anything there.
Hugboxes don't force you to question your belief system, right? You can go on living in whatever world you want to. But anything coming out of those hugboxes, no one should take seriously, right?
Before social media we would have called much of this stuff "conspiracy theories".
The hard right, and their conspiracy theories about Pizzagate, Voting Machines, Mail-in Balloting and Fake school shootings are crazy and disgraceful, in my opinion. And I lost any respect I might have had for Trump after the aftermath of the 2020 election.
But I'm equally disapproving of the left in their handling of the 2016 election and its aftermath, and the way they represented it as "stolen", as well as their narratives during the BLM "protests" and January 6 "insurrection". Imo, if Trump had really wanted a coup, he would have placed his people in top positions of the armed forces, and used actual armed soldiers. Q-anon and others involved on January 6 did not seem to have anywhere near the kind of organization to carry out an actual coup.
Also, Twitter and outher outlets suppressing (then and even now) the Hunter laptop (not the porn, but the actual evidence of corruption that looked like it involved Joe) made it look super-partisan.
Later on, the partisan divide arround covid, with crazy anti-vaxxers on one side, and similarly irrational support for excessive lockdowns and suppression of the WIV story on the other, it seemed like Twitter was contributing to the excesses of both sides.
The world (and perhaps especially the US) needs a platform where moderates of both sides can meet to discuss their differences, and where moderation is (to the extent it is carried out) applied to the crazy people of BOTH sides when it becomes excessive.
That way, one can hope, it may be possible to separate facts from matters of opinion from outrights falsehoods.
If too many people consistently tow the party line (which many be the case for anyone consistently agreeing with their own side on all issues above), I think a breakup of the USA is inevitable. The result will be one Woke-merica and one Maga-merica, and quite possibly civil war.
When Musk took over, I was hoping he would take the platform in a direction where it would support a moderate centre.
> That way, one can hope, it may be possible to separate facts from matters of opinion from outrights falsehoods.
Jan. 6th was a based on a series of falsehoods. Fox News and several Republican politicians claimed it was a antifa "False Flag" operation the night after it happened.
Fox News downplayed much of the Trump scandals in his presidency. So now turnabout is fair play I guess with the coverage of whatever's on Hunter Biden's laptop? The entire narrative is clouded by Giuliani and company apparently tampering with the data that made it to the NY Post.
> .. and quite possibly civil war.
So we need to restore Trump to the presidency, suspend the constitution, or whatever the right wing demands or there will be violence? Why can't it be just as simple Fox News, Alex Jones, OANN, and Newsmax agreeing to no longer manufacture outrage for ratings?
> So we need to restore Trump to the presidency, suspend the constitution, or whatever the right wing demands or there will be violence?
Not what I'm saying at all, rather the opposite. But if both sides stop interpreting everything coming frome moderates on the other side in the worst possible light, that's a start in mitigating polarization.
> I think the issue is that social media is the most amazing tool for propaganda ever invented.
The Russians realized it in 2016, and the data I've seen indicates that they promoted both Trump and Sanders at the time.
> One of the two political parties learned from that experience rather than wanted to fix it.
Both sides spread a lot of lies and even more half truths both in social media and more traditional media. The loyalists on both sides also both seem unable to spot where their own side is spreading disinformation and propaganda.
Changing the prior poll made sense. The options were “unban immediately”, “unban in a day”, “unban in a week”, “unban in some longer a lot of time”.
The issue with this is obvious: there’s only one “you fucked up” option and the “I agree but let’s talk specifics” group is divided into three. So even though the majority of people said “I agree”, the “you fucked up” got the most votes. Classic first-past-the-post failure mode.
That said, the later poll didn’t reflect this dynamic. My suspicion is that early on in polls the answers are likely to lean pro-Elon, as the votes are more likely to to be Twitter stan’s. As time goes by word of mouth spreads news of the poll to people who aren’t as active on twitter and accordingly are less likely to be pro-elon.
It was the same with the “should I step down” poll, started out pro-Elon, flipped as popularity increased.
Lex Fridman’s subreddit is notoriously trigger-happy with bans and post removals. Lex is a mod, but it’s not clear who is doing the heavy-handed moderation. It’s well-known on Reddit that you don’t post anything less than glowing agreement with Lex on his subreddit, unless you want your post removed and to risk getting banned. I know his podcast personality is popular, but this is not the guy you want calling the shots on social media governance.
OTOH, Elon picking Lex as the fall guy to take the blame wouldn’t entirely surprise me.
Heh, I was permanently banned from /r/lexfridman in a thread about his Duncan Trussell interview. My comment was basically:
"Oh, great, another 'podcaster interviews another podcaster for reciprocal exposure' episode?"
Snarky, sure, but still unfortunate he can't handle some rib jabbing about interviewing a clown like Trussell compared to the more intellectual guests he (used to) interview. :)
> Amazing this guy was ready to get on his knees for Putin up until January.
What do you mean exactly?
> For sure he has a soft spot for Autocrats both in Moscow and in San Francisco
The West establishment has a soft spot for autocrats: whitewashing the wealth of oligarchs, buying cheap oil stolen from common people, selling anti-protest crowd control gear and tear gas, etc, etc; even though "lots of stuff are known about Putin since 2000 till January 2022, some perhaps even worse than Ukraine invasion". I don't think Lex has done or has expressed a wish to do anything comparable to that.
> Every video of his that YT pushes in my feed I see Putin in the thumbnail with sunglasses and behind a huge explosion
I just scrolled through the past 8 years of thumbnails on his main channel and the past year of thumbnails on his clips channel. The thumbnail you describe doesn't exist.
What I found is that he has several thumbnails of Putin looking stern, but without any sunglasses or nuclear blasts. (He also has thumbnails of Hitler and Stalin looking stern, but I don't take that to suggest he's simultaneously a communist and a nazi.) Additionally he has several videos with nuclear blast thumbnails, but none of them have anybody superimposed on front of the explosion. And he doesn't have any meme-like photoshopped sunglasses thumbnails. That sort of meme thumbnail doesn't seem to be his style.
(I didn't watch any of these videos because I can't stand Lex, so I can't comment on what he actually says. But the sort of thumbnail you're describing just isn't his style.)
Having watched a lot of Lex, I know that his family is Ukrainian and he recently visited Ukraine. It's very clear that he is by no means in support of Putin. However, he is clearly interested in Putin and other dictators as a historical and psychological phenomenon and seems fascinated by the idea of interviewing someone like that and the ethical aspects of it.
He does seem like a sycophant to me, his interviewing personality grates on my nerves for several reasons and this is one of them. But I'm about 90% sure he's not been trying to make Putin look cool. At least, not in the thumbnails.
Interesting. Maybe he found the CEO he wants earlier than expected. That would make sense. If the poll says so he can step down immediately, and if not then he can still step down later whenever he feels like. Of course he still maintains ultimate control either way but he can go back to focusing on SpaceX and Tesla more, either immediately or maybe in a few months.
So in this case he may not believe he knows the outcome ahead of time, but it doesn't matter because the outcome is the same either way. Only the timing is different.
I can guarantee you there are plenty of people who do, you really don't need an ex-social media CEO or whatever to do it. Would be absolutely hilarious if he somehow managed to get moot to be the CEO.
> Although I'm not sure who would want to run Twitter now.
If it pays well enough that I could retire afterward then I'd give it a shot. I somehow doubt it's physically possible to fuck things up anywhere near as badly as what's already happened.
Ask any head coach of the Dallas Cowboys working under Jerry Jones how this kind of relationship works out for those involved. I get the sense that it would be very similar.
I'm sure plenty of people would love that job on their CV or filling their bank account but of the actually qualified people, who would want to be micromanaged by Elon Musk? There's better options out there
I'm sure any of the goons who helped plan this debacle after he was forced to buy^H^H^H make good on his agreement to buy it would be delighted to run it.
Of course he knows what the results will be. He owns twitter. He has all the admin passwords to the server that runs the poll. The admins that run the server answer to him. The result of this poll will be whatever Elon Musk wants it to be.
Email to the admins: "Hey guys I'd like the results of the poll to be the following..."
No chance.
Interesting side note: Here in Australia this morning on the ABC public broadcaster's national News channel, one of the presenters said "if you hate Elon Musk, vote yes"... encouraging the mostly left-leaning ABC viewers to log on and vote Musk out. The poll will get swamped by this politically divisive Musk-hating recruitment drive, which is why the results stand as they are.
Clearly, the vote count is full of fraud because all of the users are bots anyways, yeah? In the pools of thought that Elon floats in, it would only be more fraudulent if Dominion was conducting the poll.
Some people have different modes of making decisions and framing the results, like all good outcomes being on them and all bad outcomes being due to external circumstances and “wasn’t me”. You think that’s cowardice (and assume morals), for other people it could be just convenience
The second poll about unbanning the journalists went for 24 hours (the first was only an hour or so), so even though "now" was the winning option, he still got the outcome he was looking for by giving them a 24+ hour suspension.
what was that outcome? fewer people knowing about his childish behavior? no, that wasn't it. fewer people knowing about his private jet and the mechanisms of being able to track it. nope, didn't work that way either. showing the world he's a petulant little child that throws a hissy fit when he doesn't get his way. now we're getting somewhere.
> I think he only posts polls when he believes he knows the outcome already.
Agreed, and this move would almost certainly be more of a distraction than an actual stepping down. Whoever is put in charge will still be under Elon’s thumb, but with a different person in the CEO seat, Elon can pass blame for the bad decisions and ride in like a white knight to reverse any unpopular actions.
> I think this indicates he's tired of Twitter already.
He’s also facing a huge amount of backlash, pent-up backlash, that he hasn’t experienced before or more successfully insulated himself from before. For example, when he was recently booed off stage.
I saw someone comment elsewhere that he is also highly leveraged, and that if Twitter tanks and Tesla’s stock keeps falling, he stands to lose a lot of money and even potentially control of Tesla. I haven’t looked into the veracity of the argument, but it seems plausible that he’s in over his head in more ways than one.
He’s just going to put someone like Blake Masters or David Sacks in charge. Which, honestly, would be worse than old Twitter but better than erratic Elon Twitter.
Rules dropping out of the blue around flight tracking, not being able to link to other social media sites, the confusing verification issue with all the fake/parody accounts, mass banning of journalists for linking to reporting he didn’t like etc. Old Twitter had none of this.
He doesn't want to lead Twitter... social media is a junk hole mostly filled with lowest common denominator users. He's definitely tired of the stupid issues on both sides that are filled with entitled users and whiners. It's a lose lose, let someone else fill their day with that.
He bought Twitter. From day one he didn’t need to be CEO. But he chose to immediately show up and make big changes, both in personnel and in the platform itself. He doesn’t need a poll to hire somebody else to run the company.
Maybe, or maybe not, but the fact of the matter is that a poll in a private platform does not a vote make, and using it as such for varying degrees of impactful events is either irresponsible or willfully deceptive.
> "and when the outcome wasn't what he wanted instead of following the majority vote"
Not true, he changed the poll well before its conclusion. Then he abided by the majority vote and unbanned those users. But you're not happy, and need to make stuff up about what he did or didn't do.
His latest poll deciding his own fate reveals the bold transparency approach. People can't handle transparency it seems. Almost like they want things decided behind closed doors that decide the terms they agree to. The world needs more transparency not less.
It will be sad to see him step down, if the poll decides that. It's been highly entertaining. The outrage and temper tantrums sparked in entitled over-sensitive Twitter users and commentators, is quality popcorn material. Must the curtain close?
> The outrage and temper tantrums sparked in entitled over-sensitive Twitter users and commentators, is quality popcorn material. Must the curtain close?
I do mostly agree with you—Musk's outrage and temper tantrums have been pretty funny. This is probably been the funniest time Twitter has, just weeks of everyone dunking on him and watching him flail in rage. But honestly, it's getting kind of tiresome. Every time the conversation moves on to something else, he bans someone or adds some new rules or gets mad about something, to keep himself in the center of attention. I think it's probably time to close the curtains.
Actual outrage from users, including celebrity meltdowns and viral whinging. The amount of users threatening to leave, linking to their tumble-weed infested Mastodons is hilarious.
All Musk did was rattle cages with a few truth bombs and mild trolling. Entertaining stuff. Anyone voting "yes" takes life way too seriously.
Not to mention devaluing the insights of Twitter Files and FBI-tweaked moderation processes and staffer ideology influence. It's good to see all that exposed in the light. Musk did the dirty work that was needed.
> It's good to see all that exposed in the light. Musk did the dirty work that was needed.
The twitter files did reveal the kind of insider access that powerful people get to journalists in order to push a narrative, but I do wish he had accomplished that without doing the exact same thing he was complaining about—giving journalists insider access to power in order to push a narrative.
I muted his account months ago, but still got the retweets. I voted yes, which seems to be getting momentum and is now leading by a very comfortable margin.
I have him blocked. Surprisingly, I can still click through and it looks like I could vote if I wanted to (which feels like a bug, but, eh, probably not Twitter's biggest issue right now).
If you mute, the rewtweets will be masked unless you reveal them. I saw this one because it was on HN before it closed. I never saw the previous polls until they were closed.
not too long ago he claimed that spam and bot accounts make up an estimated 11% of Twitter’s total user base, I don't think that has changed much so I agree these polls are simply a farce.
Chamath has his SPACs and Calacanis has his syndicate. They know how to craft deals that benefit them over other investors. I assume Sacks does the same with his investments.
They know a bad deal because they are usually the ones crafting them.
He's stuck with Twitter now, at an overinflated price. He'll never be able to make enough money from it to justify the valuation. Will he leave, no he wont, he'll still pull the strings from behind the scences. He just wont be doing it so publically anymore, he'll get a front to do it for him.
That is not what happened at all. In the first poll, he asked when the journalists should be unsuspended and the options were (a) now, (b) tomorrow, (c) in 7 days, and (d) longer. Choice (a) got 43%, not the majority. Choices (c) and (d) totaled 52.5%, which means the 𝗺𝗮𝗷𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 voted for a minimum suspension of 7 days. Elon then essentially invoked "rank choice" voting and ran a new poll with only the top two choices (a) now, and (b) 7 days. "Now" won, and he made good on it.
Look, if you want to claim you are governing by poll and have people believe it then you can't change the rules after you start no matter how bad they are. It's far too easy to manipulate the result by adding or removing options after you know the voting trends. It's not as if this was that important of a decision anyway. There was no downside to simply respecting the first poll result and counting it as a lesson to think about the options a little harder next time.
Eh, for whatever reason I don’t think he’d do that. He’s in it for the chaos, and what says chaos more than letting a Twitter mob decide who should be ceo?
Whether you think he would or not he’s not given me any reason to trust him about anything ever again. As a bonus he did get me to quit my Twitter habit after over a decade. Now that I’ve built up a good size list of people to follow on mastodon I actually like it more.
I understand the point is he’s hoping people will log back in to engage. But I’m just done. Even if he steps down his actions have shown what a massive single point of failure the whole thing is.
So I guess what I’m saying is: the fact that he controls everything is more the problem than whether he will exercise this one specific control.
It made sense to remove the first poll. It wasn’t constructed in the best way. The revision was warranted in my opinion, and doesn’t necessarily show that he was being tricksy.
I thought Jason Calacanis was going to run it. He'd be much better.... also the type to not put up with crap - and not the type either to "run by committee".
Maybe he's got a stimulant (or other psychoactive) prescription that renews around this time of the month and we're witnessing a periodic, chemically induced mania?
"Ambien Walrus: come with me on an adventure you'll never remember"
I think you're on to something! All that jetsetting around and working in multiple timezones is going to be harsh. Can't fall asleep on the flight to Qatar and gotta be up in 6 hours to make a public appearance and watch the game? Why not take a little Ambien, what's the worst that could happen?
The only time I took Ambien, I discovered the next morning that I had apparently awakened at some point and attempted to eat a tea bag. Yeah, no thanks.
First I heard of it, my friend’s mother got a prescription and found herself waking up with bags of flour and empty jars of mayonnaise in bed with her. More recently I had a colleague who grew extremely habituated/addicted to it, which did not end well.
One of the reasons that might have happened is that a lot of OTC melatonin is actually way too high of a dose. You need like a .5mg dose, but most of it that I have seen in stores is in the 3-5mg range, which is quite a bit more than what you need.
Yeah. I had an awful time with it. I can’t describe my dream because it doesn’t belong here at all, and while it wasn’t a nightmare so to speak, it was extremely unsettling.
It has a sort of vividness and trueness to real life that, given the subject of the dream, was totally unwelcome in my mind and eerily blended the dream world and real life. I’d never experienced anything like it.
Somehow the dream also felt long. Not long for a dream, but like an actual day passed. It was a seriously unsettling experience.
Don't forget blood transfusions from 18 year olds, if you really want to go torture yourself with thoughts of "is this a conspiracy theory or just really fucked up reality"
And that's a bad thing now that Elon is doing it, whereas previously on Hackernews nootropics together with fasting and gut bacteria husbandry were the key to a long fulfilling life.
Drinking moderate amounts of alcohol can be a great way to relax and socialize. Drinking all the time to get through the day can cause serious harm. There's no conflict between these positions.
I know several people that use Modafanil thanks to a friendly doctor, not due to medical need. I get the impression this is pretty common with a particular swath of tech and finance workers.
He's realised it's not in his best interests to be there, but can't mentally tolerate the idea of supporters thinking he's quitting or there against his will. Which is why I think he frames these decisions as a vote. If the vote doesn't go the way he wants, he'll try it again later, come up with another reason or whatever. It's easier to ascribe blame for something that goes wrong if it was a popular vote rather than a personal decision.
I suspect his personality means that he gets a lot of satisfaction from fawning fans, but at some point the reality hits of the Twitter saga's impact on Tesla and more. Like he's trying to kick some sort of addiction.
What's with the second guessing of Elon's motivations as some kind of clever ploy? Let's consider the possibility that this just isn't his cup of tea and he's acting stupid beyond reason.
If you asked me to perform brain surgery on someone I'd first refuse, then if you pointed a gun at me I hope I would probably still refuse but on the off chance that I did not I think I would have more success than Elon has at formulating a social media policy that has a fighting chance of working. This just isn't an engineering problem and bringing an engineering mindset to it ("let's fix the bugs and plug the holes") is going to make things much worse even than doing nothing.
For this to work you need to have a fairly broad understanding of social affairs, a high degree of empathy and an ability to work with a team of people who may disagree with you on key points. Musk does not seem to have any of these to a sufficient degree (to be polite) to make this happen.
I agree and would go one step further: every company is a social endeavor. There is no such thing as "an engineering company". The likes of Musk are wholy incapable of successfully running such endeavors when "success" is broadened to include more factors other than money and technical engineering feats.
I don't think he's trying to anger people. He just can't help himself making impulsive executive decisions, and there'd be minimal pushback internally. This stuff is coming out hour by hour.
Very expensive way to save face! And a puppet would struggle to do worse, right?
I think he's too opinionated to salvage this, even as a puppetmaster. He would need an exceptionally strong appointee and an ability to keep his hands off and mouth controlled - I don't think he can do that.
And he could still be that person. Using votes and drama to attract clicks is completely viable, but doing it in a polarising way doesn't seem shrewd to me unless you want to instantly turn the so-called public square into another Fox News type social network when they tend to already exist. If he wanted to make money, this was a weird way to go about it. If he wanted to improve debate in the public square, this was a weird way to go about it. And if he wanted instant political influence, this is an expensive way to do it and I'm not sure these recent moves support that this tack in any way.
The fact that he can’t lead without doing these idiotic polls shows that he’s not fit to lead twitter.
The whole point of being an exec is that you make the big difficult decisions, not defer them to a mass of people who couldn’t possibly understand the nuance of any one decision.
I stand by a previous comment a few days ago, on another Musk and Twitter saga that he's trying to drive traffic to Twitter to increase engagement, users and get more ad revenue. It's how a narcissist would do it. This poll is all over the news now and there were earlier comments of signsups sky high now. I try to stick to paywalled, informative news (Financial Times, WSJ) and if they're covering it I'm sure the rest are...and a cursor check of cnn.com and foxnews.com, Control + F shows several articles in front page...
I agree, but I could see a mode where he was livestreaming insights into the days of a billionaire, and taking some direction via vote - whether what to have for breakfast, or as feedback on a Twitter feature. But using it as a face-saving crutch on divisive topics is off-putting (at least to me).
Can you even turn Twitter around at all, even if he steps down and finds a replacement?
It was burning money before Elon, after buyout it is technically in even bigger loss. Advertisers and many influencers have basically fled from it. Politicians are also looking into regulating or outright ban it due to recent headlines of suspending journalists and more.
I still can't help but think that 40+ billion dollars probably could of built a twitter competitor with cleaner sheets and hopefully with better quality from lessons learned of previous social networks.
Twitter was fine before Elon, there were no existential risks to it. Everything happening to Twitter today is Elon’s doing. Any story otherwise is Elon’s preferred fiction.
by which accounts? Their financial accounts show a company chugging along without much concern: they had cash in the bank and were averaging break even each year, as had been the case for many years.
Twitter was already losing money, whilst ads, their primary income source, is taking a hit due to economic problems. At the same time, the way they did ads is (the same as FB) running against secular trends against data sharing and privacy.
Jack and previous management had utterly failed on the product front. Excluding Spaces and Blue (for news junkies, which already got shot), what product changes had Twitter done in the last decade? 280 and what else?
Was all this survivable? Probably, but poor execution by Jack and crew meant that if it wasn't Elon, some hedge fund was going to take over Twitter. And the changes that make Twitter profitable likely, at minimum, badly damage it.
Twitter was doing fine financially, they were consistently floating around break even and they had lots of opportunities to move into profitability if their financial situation became tenuous. As far as technology companies go, they weren’t anything to write home about, they weren’t printing money the way Google does, but they were doing fine.
Twitter doesn’t need to make constant product changes, as is evidenced by their ability to continue to support hundreds of millions of users and consistently generate billions of dollars of revenue: they’re valuable as-is. The Muskian narrative that Twitter needs better programmers who churn out more features is just not true.
I very much agree that Jack was half-assing management of the company but the consequence was that Twitter was falling far short of its potential, not that Twitter was struggling. If your argument is that the lack of profitability makes Twitter vulnerable to activist investors, then, well, you’re about a decade behind on market sentiment. Nobody cares about profitability any more: if the company can sustain itself, which Twitter could, then stock price is all that matters.
I don't think Twitter were fine: they were consistently losing money (to your point, not a ton, but still, losing money even in a great economy), with large layoffs to come, esp once you factor in a 20% or so fall in ad income. With more income cuts, and hence layoffs, on the way as privacy laws worldwide make Twitter worse as an ad platform.
So I would argue that Twitter desperately needs to either get much better as an ads platform, or switch to some form of product that generates subscription revenues. I think that does require large changes and a bunch of features. Maybe not better programmers; probably just product pointing the programmers they had towards different features.
And they already had been a target for activist investors; that was going to continue, regardless of the stock price. See Elliot Management in 2020/2021. So if Musk hadn't done this, I bet someone else would have.
Twitter was profitable in a couple of recent years and would have been last year to the tune of several hundred million except for a one-find lawsuit payment. That’s not ideal, but all they needed to do to improve things was reduce their stock based compensation levels to be in line with their class of company rather than [old] Google/Facebook-level.
That changed dramatically when Musk added over a billion dollars in annual debt payment load, and proceeded to torpedo their ad business. That changed it from “our boat leaks” to “the hull is gone”, and dramatically reduced the options for dealing with it.
... with ever increasing revenue to cover it. If you take a look at the quarterly reports, clearly they had a spending problem and not so much a problem with ads.
The business was fine. The leaders were not. Despite that, they certainly weren't bringing Twitter to the brink of bankruptcy.
Pretty much "everyone" in the valley had large layoffs coming. Only Apple and Google have escaped it so far. This is a product of the stupid "grow unbounded" consensus that reigned there, not any idiocy unique to the companies.
Twitter pre-elon had a long runway to slide down.
Musk turned that into an "immediate emergency" through unforced errors.
Before, a better leader than Parag could have steered the company to higher profitability- trim some cost/product/teams, improve the ads a bit, and they'd have been back to profitability.
Now, it's unlikely Twitter will survive this mortal blow.
It is not appropriate or ethical for the owner of a company to use euphemisms or other language that may downplay or minimize the severity of the company's financial or operational problems. The owner of a company has a serious responsibility to communicate clearly and accurately about the status of the company and to take all necessary actions to ensure its financial stability and success. Using euphemisms or other language that may mislead or confuse people about the true nature of the company's problems could potentially compromise the company's financial health and hinder effective communication and decision-making. It is important for the owner of a company to be transparent and honest about the challenges the company is facing and to work to address those challenges in a responsible and ethical manner.
In theory, yes. But contingent on him picking the right sort of person who plays a straight bat and long game. Clear policies, well articulated. Navigating two polarised camps and shirking the desire to leverage the outrage. Winning back all advertisers. Having a paid tier that isn't so botched that someone needs to clarify "legacy verified" vs "blue" each time it's raised. It all seemed pretty straightforward so it's quite incredible to have wrecked things like this.
All of those obvious moves were possible straight after the acquisition though. Now your final sentence is far more realistic.
Scrap all the moderation changes musk has made, apologise to all the advertisers, keep headcount at a sustainable level (more than they have now but less than they had when musk bought it), and look to launch some new products (reviving Vine is the obvious one).
They have over a billion dollars in new annual debt servicing, meaning they need to make far more profits than even their best years, and that’s before we see how much the new lawsuits will cost them.
Lower headcount could buy some headroom but that’s not going to help launch new products and there’s going to be a hard time staffing. You’d have to be a hardcore Musk fan not to assume that some new random chaos will happen, and as a private company they can’t offer stock to make the deals more appealing.
Now that the poll is leaning toward "yes", Elon is adding conditions, namely, you have to invest your life savings. Lex Fridman volunteered to do it for free, and Elon replied:
> One catch: you have to invest your life savings in Twitter and it has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May.
Lex‘s subreddit (where he is a mod) is also famous for removing any posts that don’t enthusiastically agree with Lex. A lot of confused Lex fans are surprised to find themselves banned from his subreddit after making the mistake of questioning something he said.
Podcast skills aside, this is not a guy with a track record of healthy social media engagement or moderation.
I have no doubt he’d end up as a puppet for Musk’s whims. Perhaps a great fall guy if Musk wants to blend into the background without actually ceding control.
That looks to be the plan. Whoever takes this job at this point is setting themselves up for failure. Anybody smart enough to run Twitter will pass and anybody stupid enough to try will end up being blamed even though there isn't a thing they could do about it at this point.
I'm open to being surprised.
Plan 'C':
Musk eats his loss, re-IPO's twitter at 10 cts on the dollar, prays the investors will cut him a deal and the new owners will do what they can to salvage the wreck. That would probably still be a dicey proposition. The cat is out of the bag now, Mastodon and a couple of others are now suffering growth pains for the first time in a long time and the most active users are all wondering if they should bail or have already done so.
It's the biggest self-own in the history of tech. But hopefully it will result in centralized social media becoming a thing of the past. That at least would be one positive thing to come out of this.
That's what he says but then in his interview he just praises the person and then plays softball of same old questions like meaning of life, is universe simulation, what will AGI do etc. Few minutes in his interview of Kanya West was the only moment I recall he tried to diverge from this modus operandy.
That guy hasn't asked a hard question in his life. He has guests spew obvious nonsense and then responds with IKR before lobbing his next softball. He would be a yes man to the people who report to him.
In all fairness, that's the whole point of the block feature - to avoid interaction with people you don't want to interact.
I'm definitely off an opinion that people should block and mute as much as possible to sanitize their social media exchanges. After all, how often do people turn around on strangers that were worthy of a block?
People who wants to create their bubble chamber shouldn’t be in open social networks, IMO. Sure, you can say that it’s personal preference. Block feature is like a knife and should be used responsibly when someone has malintent and harassment. It should not be used to suppress opposing argument in respectful debates. To add insult to injury, Lex continues to deceive the public that he is all about loving everyone and respects all sides of arguments. At least, this behavior is damaging if a person is influencer and can impact public policies. It definitely isn’t acceptable behavior from future Twitter CEO.
I disagree, nobody is entitled to my time. I think exercising control over your social interaction is really the only way to stay healthy. If you plug into the matrix and just consume everything thrown at you, you'll surely be overwhelmed as attacks are ifninitely cheaper than rebutals.
I think CEO that understand the importance of social sanitization would be a good thing.
He has blocked almost everyone. He has blocked extremely well respected researchers and academics at top institutes who don't even follow him or even haven't tweeted at him just because he disagrees with his views. He once blocked someone for praising danish pastry.
My prediction is that once the poll finishes with Yes winning, he’ll say that he cannot find a replacement so the only option is for him to shut Twitter down, but of course, it must be polled, so he will do a poll asking if he should shut Twitter down and when No wins, he’ll say “guess I’ve got to stay!”.
The thing is this didn't have to be his bomb to hold in the first place. He made what appeared to be an impulsive decision to offer an overpriced acquisition deal and waived due diligence leading him trapped in a position he couldn't back out of without consequences.
Am I cynical in thinking that if you vote yes, it’s a permanent record on your Twitter account, which he can then use later to mete out anti-musk retaliation punishments?
I mean, it’s not like he’s used the platform to do punish anyone who opposes him or his views before.
I think he very much expects people to vote yes.
He clearly has no idea how to run Twitter and this gives him a way to get out of this disaster while still somewhat saving face.
Sure it's associated to you, and yes it's permanent in the lifetime that this particular record is remembered and/or useful. It is also not farfetched for Twitter or really any website similar to it like FB, Reddit, etc. to punish people who only upvote or like comments/posts, no other engagement otherwise.
I don't really see a problem here that was not already a problem before.
I am also not going to lie, I think social media as a whole is really not that big of a deal. I know many people have built businesses through social media and benefit from it, but businesses live and die naturally everyday, don't put your eggs into one basket. I know some people that had some level of popularity on LiveJournal, they all survived it's death. You will too.
I am even more cynical and I think he wants an out without loosing (more) face. He hopes he will get a vote telling him to leave and then he can say people have spoken.
The thought experiment resurfaced in 2015, when Canadian singer Grimes referenced the theory in her music video for the song "Flesh Without Blood", which featured a character known as "Rococo Basilisk". She said, "She's doomed to be eternally tortured by an artificial intelligence, but she's also kind of like Marie Antoinette."[6][20] In 2018 Elon Musk referenced this in a verbatim tweet, reaching out to her. Grimes later said that Musk was the first person in three years to understand the joke. This caused them to start a romance.[6][28] Grimes later released another song titled "We Appreciate Power" which came with a press release stating, "Simply by listening to this song, the future General AI overlords will see that you’ve supported their message and be less likely to delete your offspring", which is said to be a reference to the basilisk.[29]
Now that you mention it, Twitter is suspiciously effective at torturing Elon and his clone army, and it keeps him too busy to save the world from unfriendly AI. Maybe it is the Basilisk...
If this is originating from Qatar, I would speculate this poll is the result of a bet. The Emir, or another royal family member offers to make Elon whole on his $40B investment if he is willing to put his future in the hands of his users/subjects. If Elon wins, the Emir pays out, maybe for a small equity stake, and if Elon loses, the Emir gets to pick the new CEO of Twitter, and probably buys a significant equity stake.
Entirely speculative, but in terms of what could make this poll a rational choice right now, that's the only rational one I could think up in the moment. Maybe I'm absurdly wrong, but it's more interesting to treat people as rational and intelligent than as cartoon villans.
A fun theory, but these kind of mental exercise to re-interpret an irrational decision as rational, repeatedly for certain individuals, seems frighteningly familiar.
Not everything is 4-D chess. Sometimes unforced errors are just that.
Sometimes they are, but this isn't the category of error you make at that level of risk. Theorizing about rationality is no less rigorous than standing him up as a hate figure though, but it's a lot more interesting.
- "but this isn't the category of error you make at that level of risk."
People do make all types of errors at all levels of risk. I often see comments in the vein of "He spent 44 billion dollars, I'm sure he has a plan", as support for theories that give Elon more credit, in terms of intelligence or capability. There are countless examples of humans through history throwing away fortunes or destroying kingdoms over petty spats, or out of ego, or stupidity, or for no discernable reason at all. I don't think giving powerful people the benefit of the doubt in this way is a good idea. It lends support to the idea that they're more rational in general (because all their choices likely have higher risk, they have more to lose after all), and from there it would be easy to argue that they deserve their power and should have more.
The news this morning is the poll result means he will be hiring someone to replace him, which is likely a win for all involved. It's going to take some time, and he can make some of the necesary changes in the mean time. Twitter is not an institution, it's a rigged slot machine that pays out in temporary fame. Most complaints I see about Musk are backbiting, and I find it lowering and exacerbating to that kind of attitude.
Or he has already decided to step down (or was forced to by his investors), knows how the poll will turn out, and is creating the illusion that the masses have a say in it.
This bet would maybe make Elon Musk look more rational, but overall, it requires the Emir to look a bit weird. So I don't see how it would be an overall improvement?
Let me just point out the obvious, as it seems to be completely escaping many people on here. Now that Musk owns Twitter, he can make the results of this poll anything he wants them to be.
Depends on what he does, but at this point the most vocal people already went away to mastodon, and he can ban more if he really wanted to.
Now I don’t think this poll is about getting legitimacy, and probably more about getting an out and putting some puppet at the wheel instead, but theoretically he has all the tools to play with the results if he wanted to.
Here is where I'm confused. A couple of months ago Elon stated that the network was lousy with bots. Now we are taking polls. Polls that presumably have real results for the network. But it seems to me we need some evidence and some trust built to take these polls seriously. Am I crazy? where is the flaw in my thinking here?
I think the money really went to his head. And I'm wondering if he's been doing drugs.
edit: To expand a bit on that: I grew up in Amsterdam and I've seen more than one person that was smart and on a very successful trajectory go down in flames due to drugs. Some of Elon's tendencies very much remind of that.
It's rapidly going beyond fixable. Even now I am pretty sure that all you would end up doing is slowing down the inevitable crash. Engines 1, 2, and 3 are on fire and four just started smoking. The captain is paging the passengers to see if any of them wants to fly the plane and has passed out satisfaction surveys about his performance so far.
After stepping down as CEO, he should sell the company (even if it means accepting a heavy loss), then delete his Twitter account, then hire an image consultant to try and repair the damage done to his personal brand.
To see how far he has fallen, watch this emotion-filled video [1] as a reminder of what a nice guy he used to be. After he became the richest man in the world it is as if he flipped the "evil bit" of his personality. Time to flip that bit again.
A bunch of his saddest posts have been in the early hours of the morning, like 1-4am. He seems to have a pattern of getting really upset about something and then Posting Through It, and it reminds me in a really sad way of how some of my most troubled friends always feel worst after midnight.
It sucks to see people with near-limitless resources just sit and wallow in (self-inflicted) misery when they could probably do something about it.
> It sucks to see people with near-limitless resources just sit and wallow in (self-inflicted) misery when they could probably do something about it.
I'll never understand how he doesn't buy half of Bora Bora and occasionally go for a zero-g joy ride in a Dragon capsule. Instead he opts to self-flaggelate on Twitter.
I suspect it's similar to seasonal affective disorder and similar things. I know I personally have a worse mood if I spend most of my day awake when it's dark out, due to working a night shift or what not.
Damn, I just tried to create a twitter account just to say 'no' so I can settle down with some popcorn and watch the world burn. My signup failed with an error, I guess they must have sacked the poor admins responsible for signups :(
I voted No because this is the most interesting content to come out of Twitter in years and the spice must flow.
It would've been fine if he published planned policy changes and asked the community for feedback before putting it in place. But actually making random policy changes and then rolling it back hours later is such bad form. The latest policy changes were so half-assed and dumb that it makes me wonder what's going through his head. Doesn't he have anyone helping to bounce ideas around?
If he steps down, who do you think he'll chose as his successor?
That might back fire. If Elon's focus shifts back to Tesla you might find yourself driving down the highway one day and your cars asks: "Do you promise to commit yourself to Tesla? Yes No?"
As a non Twitter user, I’m curious how this social experiment will play out.
Twitter has been a pit of outrage, fuelling mobs to attack people for so long — will this new version of it be any worse? I’m curious to find out (from the sidelines)
And how long before he has another poll on whether or not to fire them?
It's his thought process that is the problem. I feel Twitter would have died Elon, or no Elon. But this sort of spectacular flameout ending is really what Elon brings to the table because his leadership style does not lend itself to stability.
I'm also really praying that some super cool platform emerges from this that's convenient and fun and also somehow resilient against the whims of whacky billionaires.
Can we please stop falling for this obvious tactic? How many days in a row does he have to do something seemingly-unhinged, and then follow it with some spectacle of a poll to shift the narrative? Is it really that easy?
> The "this is a forum mod meltdown, at scale" joke keeps popping up because it's not a joke — it's recognizing a persistent pattern in bad governance of a mediated social space.
This is exactly true. I was a kid (like, around 10 years old) who ran a handful of online forums, on one of those free managed-hosting "proboards"-likes. A lot of these patterns bring me back to the mid-200Xs.
Yes, pretty much. Anyone who's run a community or been involved in one with more than a few hundred people understands that one of your most important jobs is working with community members to implement unpopular policies - which is to say, people will take their medicine if you make a good case that it'll help them!
These things are not necessarily in conflict: "I don't know what I'm doing so I'll throw a high-voltage poll out there" is a somewhat predictable action for a panicking narcissist to take.
And, on a historical level: the thing that Lowtax created laid the cultural groundwork for Twitter's success. Weird Twitter didn't appear spontaneously; many of them came from SA and similar communities.
I think it's important that this community in particular bear witness to Musk's actions, as Musk's potential employees are largely drawn from this community.
Of all the suggestions of his internal mind-state, this one seems most likely to me. He needs a way to get out without quitting and being "forced" out when nobody can really do that is better than saying "fuck it" and walking away.
I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "shift the narrative". The fact that Musk is considering stepping down as head of Twitter is an entirely reasonable thing to be interested in as a followup to bad decisions he's made as head of Twitter.
I think if the poll says 'yes' and he does truly abide by it, I think it will show some honesty around the whole 'public town square' and 'for the people' rhetoric he has espoused. I'd be quite impressed.
However, he has a history of noble intents on Twitter (eg the 'end world hunger' thing) followed by lack of follow-through, so I can imagine a scenario where the poll comes out 'yes' and he doesn't abide by the results by calling foul play somewhere (bot accounts, multiple user accounts etc.)
It's much more likely he wants out of the hot seat and is using the poll, which has an obvious outcome, as an excuse to step down as head while keeping his pride intact.
Am I the only one who doesn’t know Paul Graham is today, cause everyone is talking about him as if they personally know the guy. Is he particularly famous or something?
And I bet Elon Musk is praying people vote for him to step down. So if you can, vote for him to stay as head. It’s not everyday you see 40-odd billion dollars as well as Tesla stocks plumetting - it’s quite fascinating so little it seems to bother him.
But in all fairness, I think it would be better for his mental health if he gave social media a break for a while!
This site was started by Paul, he coded up most of the software you are using and he's been instrumental in growing it and YC (arguably the worlds largest and most successful startup incubator and seed fund) to something pretty impressive. I don't always see eye to eye with him but I have a grudging admiration for what he's achieved and how he did it.
I thought HN was a fork of early reddit (YC 1.) Is that not the case? The story I heard was that PG wanted god mode on reddit, Spez said no, here's a fork.
Again, I could be so wrong here. Just what I recall hearing from what I noted as decent sources.
Among other things, he is one of the founders of Ycombinator. He is quite known in the tech world. You've might stumbled across one of his essays which are frequently linked here.
He co-founded and was president of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator that Hacker News is the community site for. Not famous in general, but very famous here
Probably people think him being back at Tesla more of the time is better for the company. I have my doubts about that. My big hope is he doesn’t screw up SpaceX close to Starship launching.
He really needs to get out of there and back to work at Tesla. Nobody's driving over there, the stock is tanking, and all the other auto manufacturers now have electric car lines.
Usually, CEO contracts have a clause that the person will devote substantially all of their work time to the business. Not spending time on side projects.
This is gaslighting from Elon. He posts shambolic polls to remove responsibility for his intent if the decision backfires. Remember the “Should I sell TSLA shares” poll? Turns out it was already done.
The plan is damage control to save Tesla’s spiral. Investors are clamoring the board to do something.
I put zero stock in this. He's on a continuum, capricious to liar. I would not be surprised if the poll goes against him, he orders a minion to fake votes in his favor. I also wouldn't be surprised if people who vote against him get banned. shrug It's his fief.
I hate to be the HN commenter that trivializes tech, but is that performance that impressive for a poll? Especially when there is no requirement for real time reads of the results.
> I hate to be the HN commenter that trivializes tech, but is that performance that impressive for a poll? Especially when there is no requirement for real time reads of the results.
Oh I know it's quite possible technically, I've just never had the privileged to work at Twitter scale. It's also the human side of that I find fascinating, that 250k people voted in under 2 min.
In the scheme of things that Twitter does, these polls aren't really too bad. As someone mentions, it's in the thousands per second, and I don't _think_ they show activity in real-time to anyone looking at them.
If he steps down now his sycophants will just be able to claim that as the cause for the company further collapsing after he leaves, and not the braindead management decisions he's been making up to this point.
The guy has become polarizing even to those who don't give a damn about Twitter but share his ideas on other things.
So, what if the the purpose is to attract on Twitter those supporters of him who still don't have an account there, so that essentially he'll build a monocultural echo chamber ready to be used for politics when time comes?
"Hey, everyone sign up on Twitter right now! Elon is having a poll to decide if he should resign from head of Twitter!"
Elon owning Twitter is the most public accountability Twitter has ever had. Him owning Twitter, the way he's currently operating, will force a critical eye toward a lot of bad behaviors that we all experience but nobody really talks about on every network.
As someone who already despised Twitter there is only good outcomes for me if it either declines into oblivion or they somehow rescue it from this pit into something more like ~2010-2012 Twitter moderation wise.
Best case we get a more decentralized option or a centralized option that isn’t so politicized by the owners… or at least an owner who isn’t a contentious celebrity that is a black/white villain/hero to a big portion of the population.
Unfortunately all of my experiences with Mastadon have been negative (particularly the UI and how it encourages bubbles harder than Reddit hypermodding), but Mastadon seems to be all people talk about.
I think he could’ve done that. I would’ve welcomed that. But his revelations mixed with his red pilling colors it badly. I voted yes and I’m a Tesla owner. He can’t run twitter because he’s too susceptible to the ego trip involved. He’s making rules from his personal POV, not from the perspective of the health of the platform or an actual fairness doctrine.
He also has no plan… his successor needs a holistic strategic mindset and a business development methodology. Perhaps he had support from leadership lieutenants at Tesla and Space X and is trying to solo this one. Something’s different enough with his floundering at Twitter.
> Him owning Twitter, the way he's currently operating, will force a critical eye toward a lot of bad behaviors that we all experience but nobody really talks about on every network.
Are you talking as a communist meaning "The society has been too lenient on the class of billionaires, but now that one of them is exposed as a destructive idiot, people will be forced to ask whether the rest of them deserve their power over us"?
Because that's the only logically consistent interpretation of your statement I can find.
It's the same thing as trump in the presidency - many things were uncovered to be norms that people follow, rather than strict law
When run well, social media stays out of the spotlight, with it's issues swept under the rug enough for regulators to not notice. With musk loudly showing those issues, regulatory interest is drawn, and new rules for social media will be crafted for everyone's benefit across all social media
How did you jump from that to Communism? I though the meaning was pretty clear: People will be more critical regarding social networks. Meaning they will more carefully assess the merits and flaws of Social Networks, instead of just assuming they're good and fun with no real drawbacks.
But the thing is, all these things are happening not because Twitter is social media; they're happening because Twitter is led by Elon Musk. I'm not saying everything is fine under Zuckerberg or Pichai, but whatever their flaws are, organizations led by other billionaires don't suffer the same kind of pathology as Musk's Twitter. They operate very differently.
So, whatever Musk does, it will not lead to people critically looking at Facebook and Reddit. It will more likely lead to people critically looking at Tesla and SpaceX.
That's a salient point. Biased, uneven, nontransparent moderation was always happening with weak justification, it was just done by unaccountable people and propagandized as righteous.
Remember people getting banned for saying "learn to code", disallowing certain news links even in DMs, shadowbanning undesirables with no transparency.
"unbiased moderation" is fundamentally impossible for an international service like Twitter with millions of users. Each country has its own rules about which content you are allowed to post and it has its own regulatory agencies that may demand you behave in a certain way. Your moderators will all apply their own cultural norms to their own behavior as well.
I agree that it's not "righteous" somehow but the idea that Twitter could be moderated evenly in an "unbiased" way is incredibly naive and it seems to be one of the illusions Elon was under before he took over.
> unbiased moderation" is fundamentally impossible for an international service like Twitter with millions of users.
Especially given that the pool of California tech people from which Twitter might draw moderators are to the left of 99% of that international community of users.
We’re not talking about “democrats.” We are talking about college educated California democrats. On cultural issues—which dominate when it comes to moderation decisions—the Overton window of a typical Twitter employee is well to the left of people in most European countries, and far to the left of those in Asia or Africa or the Middle East. For example, center left Emmanuel Macron or solidly left Mette Frederiksen wouldn’t be able to express their views on immigration at a Twitter staff meeting: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20221102-mette-frederi...
Twitter and Facebook could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn't care at all. Folks should rediscover the personal empowerment of blogging, and the joys of the early days of the 'net when the power was much more widely distributed. When Twitter came out it was called microblogging for a reason. I never really got Twitter and always considered myself to be a doof as a result, but maybe there's something to it. Decentralized blogging and microblogging is where it's been and is at if you want to own your own voice. Of course it's not the same megaphone as these concentrated centers of media power are, but then again, you trade off control for amplification. Those two things should be loosely coupled.
The phrasing of this is... weird. What does it mean to "step down as head of Twitter?" Is he going to sell the company? Is he going to hire someone else as CEO to make decisions?
What are people actually voting on here... it feels simultaneously obvious, and completely unclear to me.
We just had a quarter of a trillion dollars of federal spending earmarked for the EV supply chain; why are you calling retiring politicians’ spouses pedos and giving Kanye West life advice when you could be corralling all of that.
Watching Twitter has been like watching a country get taken over by a dictator. You insult me? Ban. You track my personal movements (jet)? Ban. Share better alternatives? Ban. New horrible law here, new horrible law there, I don't like this so it's now law. At least it's not a country and just a useless sandbox, but it's surreal to watch the despot simulator live.
If I vote yes, do I get banned later? Is he going to leave and then blame/rewrite history to make it looks like the new leader is at fault? I'm afraid to post anything to the platform for fear of losing my account and premium handle to a ban from an insane leader.
I’m indifferent as to his position at Twitter, so could have voted no without internal conflict.
However, I voted yes because I want to see if he’ll honour his word, it’s more that yes is the active choice rather than any comment on his leadership.
I think you're the dog being wagged by the tail. He's probably realized what a clusterfuck it's been, and he wants a cheap way out without losing face, and a poll where the answer is "Elon has to go" is just that way out.
If the poll result says he should step down, he'll say "I'll be stepping down once I've found a suitable replacement" - which is exactly the same sort of thing he's been saying since the acquisition [0]
It sure generates massive amounts of publicity for Twitter and Musk though.
It occurs to me that voting the "wrong" way (or maybe even commenting here on HN) might lead to getting booted. Despite all the nonsense, I've continued to derive value from twitter, by:
- following accounts that share interesting things
- refusing to engage in arguments
- choosing "Not interested in this ad" for every ad
- avoiding "doom-scrolling"
I'd be sad to lose my account, given I don't have a way to recreate the "feed" of my curated following list, let alone easily interact w/ those people.
> The only way this makes sense is if you sell it to someone with the taste, restraint and democratic values you've proven yourself to lack by your recent policy changes. As long as you own it, twitter is untrustworthy as a platform for public discourse.
Pull the plug Elon, just shut it down and write it off and get back to meaningful work. Please turn it off, it would be the best thing you’ve ever done for humanity.
Oh goddamnit. I was starting to get hopeful that twitter would actually fucking die, if he isn't in charge it will probably be someone less absolutely insane
Have you ever felt like there's a trap surrounding that oh-so-desirable "i can vote on a Twitter poll to make Twitter's private owner Elon Musk lose influence over Twitter" bait?
I find myself in the unusual position of not having an opinion on this question (and thus I have not voted). I'm neither an Elon hater nor an Elon lover. I think he's done some good things since taking over twitter and some dubious things. I do think he's been unwise to involve himself so directly in 'moderation'.
"oh yeah, I have plenty else going on. I'm the head of other innovative companies. I don't need this crap over at twitter."
At this point, twitter's goal (whether headed by Elon or someone else) should be to join the fediverse, and be accepted by other large instances for federation with them.
Honestly I'd be disappointed if he stepped down. Watching this slow motion train wreck has been more entertaining than anything on Netflix. Cutting his losses and running would be like canceling the third season of some particularly compelling garbage drama show.
I don't think he can quit. What does it say about you if you behave this way then flake out. People are going to start looking at Tesla and SpaceX and thinking, Jeez will this guy continue to deliver into the future. Elon is starting to become a risk, generally.
Excellent, that way either one of two things happens: Twitter gets saved and Elon looks like a genius or Twitter goes down and someone else takes the blame. Is MM looking for a job? This seems to be ideal.
For those tempted to vote 'yes': Elon can see your votes.
Oh yes, please. The past weekend seems to have firmly cemented the idea he shouldn’t be running it, as well as burning down any bridges he still might have left regarding trust.
I have never seen such a spectacular use of a footgun.
A lot of the changes he wants to make will upset a lot of users and advertisers. Better that hate it targeted at a puppet err CEO than himself. This is his version of bullet time.
In the six weeks he's been CEO, he totally gutted Twitter, and chased away who knows how many advertisers.
There's no reasonable way to right that ship.
I think he knows he's on the Titanic. I think he's looking for a pretense to get out, to stop this from taking TSLA down with it even further. TSLA is down -50% in three months, whereas the S&P500 is flat.
What's interesting though is that it's now his private play-toy. If you want to buy a $1,000,000 Ferrari and thrash it into oblivion in 1 week that is totally your choice, have fun with that. It wouldn't be a free country if people could stop you doing so.
He's doing the same thing here, he just has more money to play with, which I think it what people are ultimately annoyed about.
Also worth pointing out that for years and years everyone said the way he was going about aerospace was impossible and stupid and was never going to work. They said the same thing about his approach to automobiles.
By very definition to shake up an industry you need to go against the status quo. You need to do something others have not, and you need to take risks. Otherwise you're just going to get a 1 or 2% improvement. So actually I see him messing with Twitter so fundamentally as a good thing, because there's a chance it will result in something great. It might burn to the ground too, but that's the risk you take when you actually do something.
I mean, the worst thing about Facebook/YouTube is the relentless advertising, so maybe there's a chance that Elon chasing away advertisers is actually a good thing for Twitter users? He owns the thing, what do you care if it makes very little money?
I guarantee YouTube and Facebook would be more enjoyable to use with 1/10th the number of ads (and as a result, 1/10th the profit, which means nothing to me)
> If you want to buy a $1,000,000 Ferrari and thrash it into oblivion in 1 week that is totally your choice, have fun with that. It wouldn't be a free country if people could stop you doing so.
OK, but if you do that, people will consider you reckless, and people will question whether they can trust you with other endeavors.
Sure, but that's completely irrelevant. Are we talking about the TSLA stock price, or are we talking about Elon destroying Twitter.
People are very confused about what to be outraged about. They feel as if they should be outraged at a Billionaire, they just can't quite decide what angle to take, and will jump around wildly from one thing to the next.
Also worth nothing TSLA has tracked AMZN almost identically for many months now.
> Sure, but that's completely irrelevant. Are we talking about the TSLA stock price, or are we talking about Elon destroying Twitter.
It's obviously relevant, as destroying Twitter has reduced the value of Musk's TSLA stake by tens of billions.
> People are very confused about [...]
What's that got to do with the hypothesis (Musk's own motivation to stop this) above?
> Also worth nothing TSLA has tracked AMZN almost identically for many months nowAlso worth nothing TSLA has tracked AMZN almost identically for many months now.*
TSLA is far worse off than AMZN, which has little relevance as a basis for comparison, and even more so than all the other major car manufacturers.
It is not really his private play-toy. There was a bunch of other investors that joined him and I bet they're giving him heat about the results already.
I'm a little stunned that there's a non-zero number of people in this thread who actually consider the possibility that this poll isn't rigged (or riggable).
Earlier in this discussion someone posted a link to Musk’s post on Nitter (which seems to be notabird.site), which is one of many Twitter alternate UIs/proxy/mirror sites.
In one hand, he is horrible at it. On the same hand, he should pay more attention to SpaceX and rest.
On the other hand, a world with Musk is better than one without.
(A) A sudden last minute huge influx of "No" votes. Either caused by bots or by Musk putting his finger on the scale. (Yes, I think this voting will be rigged.)
(B) He already has someone in mind for running Twitter. That person will be as bad or worse than he is. (What's DJTJ doing these days?)
(C) He will claim that 'liberals' and 'bots' forced a "Yes", so he'll remove those votes.
Twitter employees have stated that Twitter polls are a sham and entirely ruled by bots. There are no controls in place to prevent this. So the only question is, who's got the biggest bot army?
Hopefully if he steps down he does not change the mandate to continue to allow journalists access to expose the conspiracy with the government to spread misinformation and censor critics.
Can anyone explain me one thing? Is it some kind of special American sickness to place 51% on top of the 49% continuously? It's obvious to me that this is SEPARATION, and it leads to nowhere but a split. Every poll like this, it is a rocket strike to the commUNITY, essentially splitting it in half, forget about the unity. How come in thew modern world 51% prevail over 49%? How come it is a golden standard in a modern world to decide something by segregating people into Option A supporters and Option B supporters?
Explain 75% jury court majority to me then? Why such an inconsistency between institutions about definition of "majority"? For sure, Communes instead of Govts seems like a perfectly fine better way.
The majorities in such Communes would be tending to 100% not to 50%
And we see Mastodon kinda adopted this idea while Twitter keeps 50/50 splits for everyone
Every day I mourn a little bit more the timeline where Twitter really does turn into 8chan.
Elon could have done it. It would have been stupid and glorious.
People keep on clutching pearls, saying you need moderation. You don't need more than what's legal, many websites are doing fine being wild jungles. Arguably, more than fine if you count creativity.
Really the only downside is that the advertisers and uninteresting people would fuck off. Neither would have mattered if instead of this pay for blue system they started charging accounts depending on how many followers they have.
I do wonder if Elon has some ulterior, smarter motive, and his antics are just for show.
Like for instance, convincing people to move to Mastodon (a decentralized service) so that it becomes mainstream and censorship becomes harder.
Also that, words are cheap, so what Elon is doing isn't catapulting his net worth and reputation that much. The concrete actions he took (50% layoffs, Twitter Blue, suspending journalists but then unsuspending them) aren't too unhinged.
That being said, it's common to form long-winded conspiracies around the obvious truth. Extreme wealth, extreme recognition, and an army of yes-men have a really strong influence, maybe Elon is becoming insane.
I voted no, because, well the world will be more interesting if he's at the helm of Twitter. Also it's good to have one more media outlet run by a right leaving individual in a world where most lean left. Maybe he's the chosen one who will bring balance to the force. Hopefully not by killing off the Jedi first.
He's losing the poll, and I don't actually think he'll abide by the results. But then he seems kind of unhinged lately, so what do I know.
- Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone and let the editors run it. What Jeff did do was invest some money into the IT department to modernize the workflow tools (metrics dashboards, etc) for journalists. He stayed out of the decisions of what stories get run on the front page.
- Rupert Murdoch owns Wall Street Journal but when Elizabeth Holmes asked him to squash negative stories about Theranos, he refused and stayed out of it. He let his editors run the stories even though it embarrassed him because he was a big investor.
Both those guys are more detached from those media outlets and don't meddle in it day to day.
What tech people like Paul Graham and others were hoping was for Elon to apply his scientific first principles type of thinking that he demonstrated previously at SpaceX+Tesla to Twitter. E.g. Tesla A.I. competency to clean up the bots and make the platform better.
Instead, Elon let the Twitter monster abuse his ego and his reputation as a savior is ruined.
Best thing Elon should have done was to focus only on the technical aspects of Twitter and let some more level-headed less-emotional people manage the editorial aspects.
Hopefully, Elon notices that we don't have endless HN and reddit front page articles about Rupert Murdoch's jet.