Tl,dr: Musk is irratic and has no plan, per a journalist who has covered him for five years.

  • veridicus@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • HeinousTugboat@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • veridicus@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        That’s not accurate. At least not entirely. I work with a few ex-Tesla managers who tell me the opposite. He would put his hands on any random detail at any time and override people.

        • HeinousTugboat@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, my understanding is at SpaceX they’ve done a good job of isolating him, at Tesla a not great job, and obviously at Twitter nobody’s even tried.

          • T156@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            They never really got the chance. He swept in, fired the people who could conceivably act in that capacity, and here we are.

        • QHC@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I think both claims can be accurate. What I’ve gathered is that Tesla and especially SpaceX have people dedicated to preventing or fixing whatever odd ideas he comes up with. So, your friends could be 100% right, but maybe aren’t as aware of other people following behind to try and clean up the mess? Or maybe sometimes the Musk Disaster Team doesn’t get deployed in time, but they could still exist in general.

        • HeinousTugboat@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Pretty easy, honestly. You tell him what he wants to hear, you don’t tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, and you make decisions that are best for your people. If everyone that reports to him behaves like that, he will have very little influence on the company.

          Musk is a raging narcissist. He just wants to be told that he’s the smartest, funniest person alive.

    • Itty53@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • JonEFive@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • niktemadur@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • 1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • curiosityLynx@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • YMS@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Jaysyn@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Let’s not forget this dumbass didn’t really want to buy Twitter to start with & failed in his bid to back out.

    • pips@lemmy.film
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • ArugulaZ@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.