I think the simple explanation seems to be that he vastly overpaid for it, tried his best to get out of buying, and now that he has sunk all this money into it, he is trying all quickfire ways of making money via Twitter (most of which seem ridiculously bad but I doubt there are many good options for making good money via Twitter).
He should have tried at least a little bit the way that has made Twitter profitable for some quarters in the past instead of diving head first into thinking people would want to pay. Making the platform appealing to advertisers and having a sales team get them to spend.
In other words, his purchase was more political than economic, more ego than sound business judgment.
He is totally out of his element and flying by trial and error. A crash and burn is the most likely result IMO.
Social media and advertising is an inherently humanistic/social endeavor requiring a deft business touch. Musk isn't exactly famous for his humanity or his humility or his social skills. He is waddling around like a duck out of water.
> In other words, his purchase was more political than economic, more ego than sound business judgment.
Not necessarily. I'm not a fan of the guy, but I do work in investment finance. The increase of interest rates might've been the reason he didn't want to go through with the buy. We went from a world where borrowing money was almost free to a world where it's very expensive. When Elon signed himself into buying Twitter loaning money for you and me was between 0.25% and 0.50% rate, when it finalized it was between 3.75% and 4.00%. The organisational loans are different, but not by much, and not only did those 6 months show the increase in rate, our financial industry also went through the realization that this wasn't likely to end as soon as they first hoped.
I'm not sure we can ever really get into the details, but I do think that going from free money to very expensive money likely had more to do with this than his ego and bad judgement.
Elon isn't trying to destroy Twitter. It looks like he is making impulsive, uninformed decisions... Kinda like a Twitter user shooting off Tweets.
Therefore it's hard to say how fast the ship is sinking, if at all. He could make a brillant change tomorrow, then do something horrific 80 seconds later, and who knows what the net effect would be.
Yes. The only real question is whether he's trying to or it's just happening anyway.
When your competitor is Mark Zuckerberg and he can moot an alternative with the sole USP being "sanely run", and this sounds like a positive development, you know value is being destroyed.
But this was predictable way back, including for instance the Thai cave rescue, where his suggestion being shot down led him to make unwarranted, vile personal attacks.
Elon Musk comes across as a malignant narcissist. Twitter is his narcissistic supply. It is going as well as anyone remotely informed would have predicted.
He could have got out of this for a couple of billion dollars, a telling off, and a small hit to his credibility with backers. But no. He has had his thin skin exposed, and everything avoidable that has happened since is the inevitable consequence of him lashing out while decompensating.
This view also introduces the question of how badly has Elon hurt his reputation and orchestrated mythology. Until Twitter, many thought the man a "genius" that could do no wrong. After Twitter, Elon has become "very human" with glaringly obvious flaws.
He's not a typical human, though. He appears to lack the capacity for empathy and he is cruel -- he toys with people like Halli Thorleifsson in public. It is sociopathic, which by definition makes him unusual.
Sensible, consistent business leaders simply do not behave the way he does: if they are sociopaths, they at least try to surround themselves with qualified people who are not.
Elon has ruined his reputation with everyone who matters. It's not unreasonable to assume that if he makes judgements this bad in public he is making much worse judgements in private. This isn't business, it's a function of his personality.
He has not ruined his reputation with the people he is enabling: the assorted alt right and hard right wing pond scum he follows and trollishly retweets because they provide him with narcissistic supply.
The reality I suspect is that most people who know who he is don't think "he's a dick but he's a good businessman" now, because they can see that little of what he is doing is good business. He didn't have to do this at all. And the majority of people see the serious flaws in his behaviour.
And while people still have a tendency to compensate for the narcissists who crept up on them while validating their beliefs (Trump, Boris Johnson) I don't believe people have their eyes closed to Musk, because everyone who comes to understand a narcissist gets a bit better at avoiding letting more narcissists into their lives.
I always tended to believe that he's a pitiable little rich boy who is overselling his own myth, but I now believe he is malignant.
The Thai cave rescue story is what cemented it in my mind: he is a bully who expects to get away with callously punishing other people for his hurt feelings.
He's not the sort of person who should be trusted with anything, and we know from the behaviour of other severe narcissists that his behaviour will only get worse after the criticism he receives from this incident.
All those paragraphs dedicated to "Elon - Bad Man"?
> "he toys with people like Halli Thorleifsson"...
Who started the public exchange with Musk in the first place. Who tweets HR questions to their employer unless there's another agenda? After that exchange, he received a bunch of new subscribers for his upcoming announcement he made a few days later (releasing a song on Spotify and other platforms), the tweet still pinned. Among other announcements such as opening a new restaurant.
He went into detail about his disability, got world-wide media attention and sympathy, got the subscribers, got the Musk apology, had his job termination reversed, got his own Wikipedia page, among other things.
Cave Diver guy: Messy, but again the Diver guy started it. Musk had no idea who this man was until he publicly attacked Musk for trying to help the Thai rescue.
Would you take to a public forum and tell someone they can shove something they built up their ass? Who does that? The Diver guy did it. When Musk reacted poorly, then apologised, the Diver guy already had dollar signs in his goggles, tried to sue Musk for the ridiculous amount of $190 million, and was awarded zero dollars by the jury. But, "musk bad man" is the easier take, and you'll get upvotes, so just stick with that.
Interesting philosophical question: if a man buys a burning dumpster and then, giggling madly, proceeds to throw in several sticks of dynamite caked, for truly inexplicable reasons, in his own feces, can he really be said to have destroyed it, or has he merely, if perhaps prematurely, put it out of the world’s collective misery?
The site is totally unusable right now unless you're a paid subscriber, in which case it's only very slightly less unusable - so by definition I'd say yeah, Twitter as we knew it has been destroyed. Whether Elon intends to backpedal in the next 12-24 hours as seems to be his MO remains to be seen.
It's working mostly fine for me as a non-subscriber.
It's glitched a few times and popped up a "you've hit the rate limit" message on the app, but that goes away with an app restart or refresh of the page.
With cars and rockets there is a lot of government regulation and standards. Musk cannot bypass that, and that's why he is not involved into the day-to-day. He has no interest in the nitty gritty and he loses patience right away. The adults are running the grown-up businesses.
With Twitter, it's only Elon. There is no one in his way. He can do whatever he wants. If the other industries were not regulated, he would be a serial Stockton Rush disaster artist.
Start with the fact that he didn't want to buy it. He probably thought he could acquire it, make some changes, and flip it for less than a settlement would have cost. That didn't work out. If you're wondering if there's a plan, the plan didn't work, and now there is no plan. It's the special military operation of LBOs.
What I'M more afraid is that we will be under ZUCK control totally. He is going to create a massive inter application growth for his new application. I'm really worried about twitter as well
He's definitely destroying Twitter as we knew it. Whether something new will come from it remains to be seen. I wouldn't hold my breath, but I'm not going to claim to be psychic.
No need to flatter yourself. As already mentioned in our previous discussion, you just happen to pop up in posts I'm interested in, to the point where i can almost be certain you'll show up with a selection of your usual "told you so", "as i predicted", or dismissive mastodon-bashing.
Looks like I'm not the only one who's noticed, either[0] ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No, he's transforming it into a different service while getting value from the existing userbase. It's a way to make a popular tech company without relying on sheer luck that it gets a critical mass of users.
It's the revolving butthurt filters on every site with simulated user discourse (including HN). There is no such thing as a "dangerous idea" or "malinformation." But, what remains after all the thoughtcrime is censored out is just plain propaganda.
Nope. The (people aka) users, who are ... most educated, most intelligent and, ... most followed, are destroying twitter.
In somewhat more comprehensible terms: ... the golden calves are destroying twitter, not the guy who bought the thing from the guy who had no fucking idea what he was doing until someone told him ... (aka ... the dog).
