How does someone with no business acumen get to be the richest person in the world?

In My Humble Opinion
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Matt Levine, writer of the Money Stuff column at Bloomberg, essentially proposes a highly similar framework to my theory, except applied to Ray Dalio. You need to register a free account to read so I’ll provide a limited excerpt below:

Everything about it feels fundamentally right and I’ve not seen people levy critiques against Ray Dalio that he isn’t obviously smart but a new book about Bridgewater has just come out, prompting a bunch of new stories that are just wild and this theory fits the facts well.

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“Not perfect”? The guy is a complete, raving loon, not to mention a shameless bigot and staunch white supremacist. Check out the “Musk buys Twitter” thread in the Pit for lots and lots of specific examples of his ongoing idiocy, with some speculation that drug addiction may be a contributing factor. Your insistence that only the super-wealthy have any right to criticize Musk is laughable.

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Let’s say that the world’s fastest man - a gold Olympiad - is in an accident, mangles his leg, it turns gangrenous, and the leg is amputated.

Minus specialized equipment, the man is no longer the world’s fastest man. That’s not denying his past successes, it’s just accepting the current reality.

In the last few years, Musk went from being a guy whose business moves you read about and you never really needed to consider his personality or private life, to being that guy who tweeted that a cave diver is a pedophile, because he rescued some children before Musk could build a submarine; who designed and pushed through the cybertruck; and who bought a failing business and turned it into an even larger dumpster fire and paved the way for its competitors to take over the space.

I can’t say with 100% confidence what happened to Musk but I do feel like we’re witnessing the life progression of a new Howard Hughes / John C Lilly / Nikola Tesla. That doesn’t deny the successes of the past, it simply accepts the reality of the present. Smart, capable people can totally lose it just as much as an athlete can lose a limb. We’re not immune to the devastations of the world.

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There has been analysis on this kind of wild success. In nearly all cases, it’s luck, and the success cannot be reliably reproduced over time. If you have 1,000 hedge fund managers, maybe 1 will be wildly successfully in any given year just by sheer probability. That doesn’t mean he’s good. On one end of the spectrum is imposter syndrome, someone who is really good who thinks they’re not as good as everyone else thinks they are. Then at the opposite end is the wildly successful hedge fund manager.

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Business acumen?

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It’s rare that I get to experience pure schadenfreude. I treasure it.

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Yeah. As I remarked about a year ago,

I personally have no idea how smart Elon Musk really is, although like everybody else I can easily see how stupid he often appears. But I know it’s statistically fallacious to take it for granted that Musk must be exceptionally smart just because he’s (still) exceptionally rich.

It’s true that as a general rule, stupid people don’t become exceptionally rich. But it’s perfectly possible, statistically speaking, that once in a long blue moon some wealthy person could become exceptionally rich—even unprecedentedly rich—despite being stupid, just because they got unprecedentedly long and lucrative streaks of good luck.

Random chance is capable of producing some really astonishingly extreme outliers. It just doesn’t produce them very often.

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Well, it’s been a year! Apparently, Discourse notifications do work.

Twitter doesn’t seem to have died. I’m reminded of this article, also from just over a year ago:

Basically, nothing from that article came to pass. Almost the exact opposite, really: the article stated that small problems would keep compounding until they became significant (within six months, which was considered “generous”). But in fact what happened is that while there were some early glitches, they all got squashed pretty quickly. The only real issues have been limited to new feature releases, or stress tests beyond what’s been tried before. There have been no significant outages of any kind, and lately there haven’t even been small glitches (aside from the usual complaining about how the algorithm ranks people’s tweets).

Has traffic collapsed? Doesn’t seem like it. I captured this ranking from Semrush.com last year (October '22):
https://i.imgur.com/xWH8LJZ.png

Twitter at #4 with 8.0B visits. And then from September this year:

Well, they’re down to #5. But with 8.4B hits, so overall traffic has increased. Interestingly, though, X.com gets 1B hits. If you add them together (since they go to the same place), it would put Twitter above Wikipedia and back at #4. Either way, this isn’t exactly some giant collapse.

Ok, but what about the zeitgeist? Has Twitter left the public consciousness? This is fuzzy and impossible to say anything objective about, but again: doesn’t seem like it.

For instance, the recent stuff about OpenAI was entirely hashed out on Twitter before it made it to the media (which just repeated what was already posted). So major stories are not just breaking on Twitter, but it’s actually the primary source for information on these stories.

And not that the SDMB is exactly a hot website, but the external social media links here are still dominated by Twitter. It’s certainly the most common social media source in breaking news threads like “Russia Invades Ukraine”.

As for its peers, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a Mastodon link to anything, and just one or two Threads links (which couldn’t be read in-line). Bluesky is still closed so I suppose it’s no surprise we don’t get anything from there. The only social media site that sees remotely comparable use here is YouTube, but it’s not as common for breaking news stuff (plus a lot of people don’t know how to work around Discourse’s breakage).

At any rate, obviously there is still a great deal of turmoil, especially with respect to advertising. But even with zero advertising, Twitter would be losing money at a lower rate than when it was bought, and Musk can easily fund it indefinitely with money from his sofa cushions. So it’s unlikely to go under from lack of funding.

Does the current state even remotely resemble the catastrophe you predicted? They haven’t yet turned it into an “everything app,” so we’ll have to wait and see on that one. But in my view, the site still functions we well as it did before Musk bought it, and as best I can tell, whatever political extremism exists there is invisible to anyone that doesn’t intentionally seek it out.

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I think it is quite the stretch to say things are going well, what with 2/3rds of the advertisers pausing or leaving the platform.

And of course recently most paused advertising on the platform.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertiser-decline/index.html

And there has been a notable increase in Lindell pillow type ads.

So ok, it didn’t fully collapse. Congratulations to Elon for not making it quite as much as catastrophe as was originally thought.

So let’s just say Twitter’s “success” does not inspire me to think that Musk is a business genius. Especially since all of Twitter’s hardships seem to be directly caused by Musk. That’s pretty amazing for a business genius.

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This article claims that the government and military are going to use more of Musk’s services.

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I’ll take that :slight_smile: . There are undoubtedly still some self-inflicted issues. But I think it’s safe to say that much of the reporting a year ago was, shall we say, a bit over the top. The MIT article I cited was one of the milder ones.

There was always going to be a conflict between advertisers and allowing more extreme speech. This would be a problem if the goal was to absolutely maximize advertising revenue. That does not seem to have been a goal.

I recently saw a Community Note applied to an advertiser, calling them out for claiming some celebrity endorsement (Rogan, maybe? I’ll have to check), which turned out to be bullshit. I’m sure the advertiser was not pleased. But I’d hope most would agree that this is a good thing to allow–misleading advertising is a huge problem, so any mechanism for citizen pushback sounds great to me.

As for the advertiser pause–I’m looking forward to seeing how the lawsuit against Media Matters goes (they were the ones that initiated the latest round). Bernie Sanders supporters in particular should be interested–Media Matters was David Brock’s creation, and Brock produced various anti-Sanders hitpieces. He’s responsible for a huge amount of (legitimate) grievance against the Democratic establishment. And possibly responsible (in part) for Trump’s election, due to Sanders supporters staying home because they felt that the system was rigged against them.

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Of course they are. SpaceX is by far the best in the launch provider business by any metric–cost, reliability, launch cadence, range of services, etc. Starlink is by far the best satellite-based internet provider, and Ukraine would have collapsed within the first few weeks without them. Tesla produces the best EV charging infrastructure and virtually all EV manufacturers have switched to the Tesla standard for North American cars.

The White House pushback is, IMO, linked to one thing: unions. Trump won because he got working class votes from people who did not particularly care for progressive policies and felt like they’d been ignored by Democrats (and Clinton in particular) economically. And Biden won by winning those votes back, and being a legitimately more credible union supporter.

So Biden cannot give the slightest bit of credit to Musk, on any front, because Tesla and SpaceX are not unionized. Biden even tried to tie the EV subsidy plan to union production (IMO, basically holding the climate hostage to serve them), though I think some of those restrictions got cut eventually. A while back he held some EV conference and forgot to invite Tesla. While claiming that GM is the EV leader in America.

It’s hard to argue against the tactic, because I think it’s working. Nevertheless, the government needs those services. So they’ll use them and try to be quiet about it.

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There is also a difference between allowing more extreme speech, and the company owner himself posting or at least applauding that extreme speech.

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I hope this link finds your approval.

And I will admit being baffled by some people’s reverencial attitude towards Mr. Musk. People who are not stupid, really not. And still switch off all critical thinking when evaluating Mr. Musk’s words and deeds. There seems to be a parallel here with other people, intelligent people too, but mostly different people, who suffer the same delusion with Mr. Trump. I do not understand it.
Perehaps I suffer from Musk Derangement Sydrom?

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When I first saw that truck I thought it was a concept exercise that would never see a production line. I am puzzled at the kind of person who would see that and say, “Yes, that meets all my transportation needs.” I think buyers are buying it so they can be the first one on their block to have one.

That build quality makes it look like someone’s garage project. Maybe Batman’s “throw away the first version” of a Bat Truck.

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For example, why would a media operation need advertisers?

Because of course, Elmo’s decision to re-tweet an anti-Semitic tweet couldn’t possibly have contributed to the flight of advertisers.

It’s the advertisers who are killing the company.

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I just watched that entire interview. In some ways, he seems like someone starved for attention and approval. Anytime the audience reacted with a chuckle at something he said, he would repeat it again and again, as if the laughter was feeding his soul. And boy is his laugh dorky.

Obviously, he’s brilliant in ways I’ll never understand. He can’t see past the motes in his own eyes though, in my humble opinion. At one point in the interview he says something about the ring of power and the dangers of having it, but seems to think he is immune. He’s not.

Another bit about free speech was amusing, but not in the way that had him giggling. Free speech is absolute, but he’s free to make people who don’t pay him less visible on the platform because, well, it’s not free in that way. It’s just free to everyone to post about Nazi’s as long as they put a community note on the bottom. Why, even he got a community note!

He’s just an oddball.

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I’m glad you posted this instead of me. If I had posted it, then I’m sure it would be dismissed as coming from a Musk-hater.

But yeah, for a business genius, he sure doesn’t exhibit a lot of business genius. Or perhaps his acumen is simply beyond my simple brain to comprehend.

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People can certainly judge whether Elon Musk’s acquisition and subsequent management of Twitter has been a success. But it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that one of the wealthiest businessmen in history has “no business acumen”.

That’s like asking “how does someone with no athletic ability get to play professional baseball?” about Michael Jordan.

You can’t argue that Elon Musk isn’t a smart guy and a successful businessman. But he has a particular (some would say callous and authoritarian) management style that may not work in every sort of company.

If anything, Elon Musk is an argument against the theory of the “professional executive” who can just drop into any company and run it.

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Sure I can by looking at the evidence from Musk’s history.

There precious little evidence that Musk is a business genius other than his wealth. But we all know that people can accumulate wealth without business acumen. Not that all people who accumulate wealth are just failing upwards. There’s plenty of successes with the evidence to back up their reputations. Warren Buffett is certainly a markets genius because he has a very long track record of success. Steve Jobs was certainly a business genius managing to build Apple not once, but twice.

Musk made money selling a company in a tech bubble where any company with a .com was “worth” millions. Compaq vastly overpaid, barely used it, and then went under (not because of buying Musk’s company).

Musk was a failure at PayPal and was bailed out by Peter Thiel. If not for Peter Thiel, than that’s where the Musk story ends.

Now, his next decision was a good one. He bought into Tesla and marketed (lied) the heck out of it. Something he continues to do today. Tesla was mainly kept alive by the gov’t grants that Musk rails about today.

Space X is definitely his best unarguable success. But to what degree is he responsible for that success? He wasn’t visionary to see a gap in the market, because it was a well-known gap. There was even a prize for it. And he definitely didn’t design or engineer anything. It was one of the few instances where Musk had enough good sense to go and hire talented people. Is going and hiring good people “business genius”? I mean he probably clears Donald Trump at that point but …

Boring Company is a stupid idea, that is failing. $750 million dollars for 2.4 miles of inefficient transportation. And all of the other Boring projects have fizzled because cities are going … “Uhhh… no.”

Hyperloop was, and is, a lie.