Elon Musk Really Broke Twitter This Time - The Atlantic
Elon Musk Really Broke Twitter This Time - The Atlantic
Tl,dr: Musk is irratic and has no plan, per a journalist who has covered him for five years.
What if everyone is making the wrong assumption about why he bought twitter? I'm convinced he didn't do it to make money. He bought it for the power, to control one of the world's largest microphones. He doesn't care about advertisers who will dictate content rules.
At SpaceX, Tesla, and other companies he hired industry experts. He's running this one completely differently and I believe his focus is politics and power instead of money.
At SpaceX, Tesla, and other companies he hired industry experts.
At SpaceX and Tesla his direct reports have isolated him from having any major impact on the rest of the company. Twitter had no such luck.
He bought it because he got caught red handed trying to commit securities fraud and if he didn't make good on his offer, the SEC would've at the very least kicked him out of the markets, if not put in prison.
He is now trying to destroy it faster than it will destroy him. Social media is too expensive to run without a carousel of new investors. He can't get any since he took it private. He can't pull the plug on it or his existing investors will crucify him, they're just biding their time on a lawsuit already.
He over played his hand and he is suffering consequences for it. This doesn't make him smart, mind you. He's just scrambling to cover his ass from a blatantly poor and criminal decision.
Yeah, people tend to forget how this all started. He just wanted to see under the hood and he was told that the only way he could do that was if he bought the company.
He saw a big opportunity to both get what he wanted and to manipulate the stock market in a big way. So he made a credible offer thinking that he was smart enough to create a loophole that would give him a way out. His loophole didn't pan out although the stock market manipulation arguably did.
He got too far along in the process to back out and the SEC doesn't fuck around. There was no option other than to actually make good on his offer to buy the company. I don't think he ever truly wanted to own Twitter, but I never thought he would set the company ablaze in such a spectacular fashion.
He's just scrambling to cover his ass from a blatantly poor and criminal decision.
While at the same time still performing a never-ending stream of the same fidgety, impulsive, entitled behavior and decisions that put him into this mess in the first place.
his existing investors will crucify him, they're just biding their time on a lawsuit already.
One wonders how big of a chunk of Tesla and/or SpaceX they've got their sights on, after they really get their knives out and go to Attorney Town on this narcissistic imbecile.
Elon's trying to show people how smart he is by running this one by himself. And he is succeeding — people are now realizing how smart he is.
At SpaceX, Tesla, and other companies he hired industry experts.
And proceeded to overrule them with idiotic ideas like "scrap all sensors etc, our self driving cars will drive with image recognition only". And now most companies with self driving cars in development are miles ahead of Tesla despite starting later.
Did they start later? Where Tesla had an advance was integrating major parts of a self-driving system into actual customer cars and collecting tons of real-world data. The internal research on autonomous cars probably started on most automakers long before Tesla was founded.
Let's not forget this dumbass didn't really want to buy Twitter to start with & failed in his bid to back out.
However he is steadily reducing the platform’s reach and user base, an interesting plan to be sure…?
I thought he got legal railroaded into buying twotter
Whether he's in it for the money or the influence doesn't really matter... either way, he's doing it wrong, and he's inconveniencing (or outright harming) people in the process.
That tracks with what I've heard from people in the industry. For Musk and now Huffman, it's some sort of ideological or philosophical thing in terms of how they've dramatically shifted the focus and operation of these previously (mostly) stable companies.
Running a social media company is not at all like running a normal tech company. It's one part technology, but it's one part psychology. He doesn't understand the psychology part whatsoever. He doesn't understand stand why people choose to engage or not engage with a community. He doesn't understand how and why Twitter became part an important news and information source and all of decisions he's made so far have reduced the relevance of the product.
Twitter verified status is there to help people trust Twitter, not just the person behind the checkmark. Now nobody trust your product. It also doesn't take a genius to understand that limiting access to your product makes people use it less.
Elon has publicly claimed to have Asperger's (or, as it's known by the modern DSM, "ASD Level 1").
While I don't know if that's a self-diagnosis or the truth, I also have ASD Level 1 so I can somewhat understand his thought process... sometimes.
The fact that the platform makes the community isn't necessarily something I'd consider at first, and I don't think Elon considered it either. I really do think Elon was mad about how much people on the internet disliked him, so he made an impulsive bid to kick 'em out and tried to buy the whole platform. At some point someone talked some sense into him and he tried to back out, only to realize he was trapped in the deal and couldn't back out.
So the only thing he could really do at that point is double down. Kick the people off the site that he wanted gone. Find a way to kick out the bots that were clearly irritating him. Unban people who he thought were unjustly banned. There are easy and simple solutions to all of those things, and although they aren't popular that's sort of the problem with ASD Level 1:
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Failure to make eye contact or read social cues properly
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Challenges in establishing or maintaining conversations
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- Apprehensive behavior
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- Trouble shifting focus
Expand that behavior up to a community of millions of people and you can start to understand Musk's behavior. It's fundamentally a community, with social norms and mores that aren't immediately obvious to those with ASD Level 1 (myself included). ASD makes it hard to have a grasp on why a community is there, and if you're a megalomaniac on top of that I can see how it'd be very easy to just say "Eh, I'll change it to work for me" without care for how it affects everyone else that uses it.
So you have him just making all these dumb-looking changes because understanding and empathy isn't his strong suit. He just does what he thinks will fix "the problem" and assumes that users are a given.
Yeah but Elons problem isn't just the ASD - that's part of it sure, but his problem is having ASD and a mother who told him repeatedly from a very very early age, that he was a genius.
That would be damaging to a neurotypical persons self view, but I dread to think how that damages a neurodivergent 😲
In short, Elon definitely displays narcissistic tendencies - and I suspect that being constantly told you are a genius who will change the world, is a bug reason why.
The fact that the platform makes the community isn't necessarily something I'd consider at first, and I don't think Elon considered it either.
Small correction, it's actually the community that makes the platform. The community exists regardless of platform, the platform is there to help the community connect. The platform can help make new communities by facilitating connections but the platform needs communities to exist. People will form communities tailored to their interests without the internet all day, they've done it for millenia. If the platform makes it difficult for communities to connect, then the community will just go elsewhere.
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Doesn't he have a condition that keeps him from understanding social norms? Wouldn't that alone disqualify him from making decisions about a social media company/site?
Yes, it's called narcissism
Yes, he is a billionaire that was born into money. He has no idea how much a Star War costs, let alone a banana or gallon of milk.
“It’s remarkable how many people who’ve never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who’s run Tesla and SpaceX,”
Running a company doesn't necessarily indicate you are good at it. I don't need to be a pilot to understand that diving into the ground is a fatal idea.
Indeed, SpaceX was indeed almost bankrupt. It only succeeded because the last attempt to launch and land a reusable rocket got them a massive cash injection from NASA. But if that launch had failed like the ones before it, that would have been the end of SpaceX.
It's almost like a ceo is only as good as the product and the people they surround themselves with.
Twitter could never be a profitable business, the numbers don't work. No one with visionary talent wants to associate themselves with Musk's right wing tweets.
Musk isn't a genius, he's a person who started with money and made much more money on a few things that went right and many more that didnt.
Just to note, this isn’t a quote from the article’s author, but Paul Graham in late 2022.
He messed up the one thing that twitter folks can’t forgive or forget - he cut off their supply. People can’t do the one thing they needed twitter to do.
Reddit did the same thing. I could trust my supplier not to taint my shit. If I buy from the official source they cut it with all sorts of crap I don’t like.
His solution was also to cut down their usage, which is basically the opposite of what you want your users to do when you're running a social media network.
Fewer users means that there are fewer people watching the ads, which means less income. It also makes it harder to justify subscribing to their premium service if you're on the site less.
Rich egomaniac idiot is, at the core, still an idiot. Got it.
His supporters are confused and, perhaps, starting to feel the cracks of cognitive dissonance. “Surely someone who can figure out how to build spaceships can figure out how to distinguish scrapers from legit users,” Graham—the same one who supported Musk in November—tweeted on Saturday.
Elon stans still stanning.
How can anyone watch this dumpster fire and conclude that Elon Musk knows what he's doing with this company? My only guess is that he's intentionally tanking it so he can get out of it through Chapter 13.
EDIT
Most importantly...Elon Musk does not build spaceships. He runs a company that builds them. He is not a rocket scientist.
How can anyone watch this dumpster fire and conclude that Elon Musk knows what he's doing with this company?
A lot of people look at how a company is doing and credit their success to the handful of people in leadership positions or in the public eye. Unless people can see your name and face you basically don't exist as anything more than an interchangeable cog in a machine. It's hard for people to give you credit when they don't know that you exist or what you do.
I truly don’t understand how Musk’s other companies made it so far if this is how he was running them. Was he always this poor of an executive?
As far as I can remember, yes. I graduated with a degree in EE in 2015 and considered trying to apply at SpaceX, but after hearing some anecdotal stories of long ruthless work hours decided against it. I don't think his companies are well known for a great work life balance nor workers feeling like much other than another cog in the machine. They still did some great work though.
Most of them have people and procedures for dealing with him. Twitter appears to have had no such luck.
His latest decision was terrible.
If we have an analogue to r/EnoughMuskSpam, I'm not aware of it. But I'm also not sure we need one if his fuckups keep being dramatic enough to top the regular news communities.
RIP reddit, RIP twitter
Who is next? Facebook would have to make a notable blunder to join them. Unlikely.
Let the older generation stay on Facebook. We don't want them out in society.
Let the trolls stay on Twitter, let the types of people whom defend Spaz stay on Reddit, and let the influencers stay on Instagram. Those are the best places for them.
If you're comfortable with Lemmy, then there are enough of us here to let this grown organically.
We don't need one platform to rule all.
Meanwhile, Tumblr is strangely still around. They had a minor Blunder, but that basically became a site-wife in-joke, and they seem to be doing rather well for themselves.
Are there any major social media companies left after them, besides Facebook?
When I reached out for clarification, the company auto-responded with an email containing a poop emoji.
You can't make this [poop emoji] up, people would say it's too farfetched.
Twitter isn’t dying and isn’t broken. I have also learned the Atlantic is hit and miss. The users and content is still on Twitter. The people going to Mastodon are the niche group of techies. Mastodon isn’t for your casual or average twitter user which is a majority of twitter.
I think news and ads ruined social media today. I do miss the days of MySpace when people used to log on, hangout and message each other. You used to connect with your friends online. Today, social media isn’t really used like that anymore.
Social media platforms die in stages. That "niche group of techies" are a big part of why Twitter became what it did in the first place. It's not an insignificant group.
Twitter was never consistently profitable and these moves aren't helping, and there's definitely not going to be a savior investor after Musk. The real question is how long the company can survive, even if it remains popular in general, as that was already a big question before the ownership change.
Sucks for people using Twitter for getting real-time updates in emergency situations. Otherwise I don't think it really matters, if all of Twitter just vanishes.
Most artists primarily use Twitter as a promo tool and have all their art on other platforms as well and in better quality even.
All original Twitter content are just low-effort tweets. The only stand-out feature of Twitter is the fact, that it is so popular among companies and famous people.