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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.