Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter - now the Pit edition (Part 1)

The BBQ Pit
2984

His aim was to create a full-service online bank. He failed, and subsequently bailed out of Paypal. My WAG is that this experience helped instill his current hatred of regulators and government in general. He has a long history of antagonism against institutions striving to keep people like him honest. Also, among other things that Elmo cannot conceive of failing at is setting up a nice city on Mars within the next few years. We’ll see how that goes. And building “hyperloops” between the major cities of the world. We’ll see how that goes, too.

I don’t know enough to comment here, but by most accounts his success against Boeing was impressive, but this is a very complex issue in which the contribution of Elmo’s particular genius is far from clear.

Elmo did not in any sense “go up against the US auto industry”. He exploited a niche market that he correctly felt was a market poised for growth. The US auto industry has never been visionary, and always stodgy, backwards, and culturally downright neanderthal. This is the same industry that famously ignored the European concept of high-quality, fuel-efficient cars and continued to produce bloated overweight unsafe “land boats” that rusted away after a few years. That Elmo exploited a growth niche that they ignored is not worthy of anything more than a commendation for marketing insight and billions of dollars with which to exploit it.

ETA: Ninja’d by @BeepKillBeep about Cantrell.

2985

No, you don’t. You want to maintain your epistemic closure in the face of any evidence I provide. If I gave you the most brilliant speech ever given, you’ll claim it was just written for him. If I show you an interview where he gave brilliant answers, you’ll claim the questions were scripted.

I have now given you direct quotes and sources for them from numerous people who worked woth Musk, all claiming that he is incredibly smart. They weren’t all his employees, and none of them were current employees, and some like Zubrin are egomaniacs themselves who generally think they are the smartest ones around yet recognize Musk’s genius. We have the real-world examples of his work at SpaceX and Tesla, and the fact that he climbed from nothing to become the richest man in the world the hard way - by building comolex technical things others had tried and failed at.

There will never be enough evidence to convince you of Musk’s abilities, because your political inclinations are such that you NEED to believe that he’s a fraud. It’s like trying to convince someone of something when their paycheck depends on not believing it.

2986

No I won’t, so go ahead.

Nope, quite wrong.

2987

Yes, his ‘inability to see failure’ has a major downside in that it can cause him to come up with grandiose ideas that won’t work. I am a strong critic of both Hyperloop and Mars colonization. I think he’s completely wrong about those. But I can hold two ideas in my head at the same time: That Musk can be a once-in-a-generation industrial talent while also having some wacky ideas that will never happen.

That’s true of almost all such people in history, The things that make them stick out of the crowd by three or four sigmas bring with them personality issues and overconfidence that can get them into trouble. See: Tesla, Ford, Edison, Hughes, Jobs, etc.

But sometimes what looks like an obvious path to failure to us mere mortals winds up changing the world. Jim Cantrell thought the same thing about Musk’s chance at building rockets that I have about Mars colonization. Very smart investors have lost their shirts shorting Tesla. They were wrong, and maybe I am too. I keep an open mind.

2988

You said.

To which I responded with bad reviews.

Then you did continue with

That’s like me saying, I don’t want to go to that restaurant, lots of people who have gone there have complained of food poisoning.

And you reply, “Can you find me a single instance that someone specifically claimed there were rat turds in the consommé?”

Then whining that I cited my position, not your misrepresentation of it.

You are making two claims here. One is the Elon is smart. Sure, most people will agree that he’s well above average in base intelligence. But, you are also making the claim that because he is smart, he is able to handle the tasks he has brought on himself, and that’s the part that is being questioned.

That you deflect it to the first point is the sort of thing that gets you called a liar and pitted around here.

2989

He doesn’t have Asperger’s.

2990

Are you using Musk’s neurolink to read minds? That would explain why you are so bad at it.

2991

It sees anyone that can’t keep themselves from being an asshole is a self diagnosed Asperger.

2992

No, you guys manage to be complete assholes without it.

2993

Then why are you spending days and days looking up positive things about him? How much time have you spent on this? Do you do this with other people, or do you put Musk on a pedestal?

And everyone else is spending way too much time refuting every little detail that Sam brings up. Just because he’s willing to dominate a thread with his latest hero obsession is no reason everyone else has to waste time like that.

Do you really think, after all his rationalizations of Trump, that he’s going to say “Golly, your twentieth point really made me rethink my approach to Musk, and the next ‘strong’ public figure”?

2994

Asperger’s isn’t even a valid diagnosis as of DSM-V, and I’ve seen no evidence that a doctor has ever diagnosed him as having an ASD. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of trolls and assholes claim to be autistic or have Asperger’s because they think it gives them an excuse to act like an asshole and not be called out on it.

2995

In my amateur and humble opinion, Musk has fallen into the same trap that so many (but not all) successful people fall into - believing their own hype. Maybe he once was a genius and visionary. But years of (apparently) surrounding himself with yes men and ass kissers has killed his ability to separate good criticism from bad. Now all his critics are just victims of the “woke mind virus” or whatever. Now right wing trolls and bigots must have a point, because they’re being criticized by the same people who criticize Musk.

It’s sad. Criticism and mockery really, really bothers him. His billions of dollars isn’t enough to soothe the fragile, adolescent ego that pushed him to such a foolish decision as purchasing Twitter and taking it apart, piece by piece.

2996

…Elon must have been reading this thread because when I woke up this morning, the algorithm has been given a tweak, and a whole lot of people I haven’t seen in a month came flooding back into my feed LOL. Old friends! How I have missed ye!

And those other mystery people that had been popping up into my feed?

Gone.

Not a sign of them. Not a single one. I should have followed them while I had the chance LOL. Because I can’t even remember their names now!

Twitter may have tweaked the algorithm. However I did follow someone last night that was following me, that I thought I had already followed but hadn’t, who follows most of the people that I follow as well (especially local connections) and maybe it was following them that tweaked things enough to fix my feed.

Or maybe Twitter just restored itself to an earlier save point LOL.

2997

This is how it’s supposed to work. This is what agile is all about! Changing the software, the changing it back! Only smart successful leaders grasp this.

Your experience is evidence that Musk has changed Twitter for the better, and taught all those devs a thing or two.

2998

What’s smart? Trump is smart, depending on what you are judging him on. George W. Bush was smart, depending on what you were judging him on.

Musk is smart in certain ways. He has been able to take advantage of and manipulate certain situations he found himself in and amass a fortune. He’s smart at self-promotion. He’s smart at taking credit for things he didn’t really do.

Is he smart at automobile engineering and design? Is he smart at space travel engineering? Is he smart at creating a broad-based advertiser-supported communication platform? Is he smart at modern software architecture? It doesn’t look like he is smart at any of these things.

It also seems like he is a sociopath in several ways. If your definition of “smart” involves not being a sociopath, he doesn’t seem to be smart at that.

2999

Sure, I can see how your perception is that we are assholes since we disagree with your assertions. We question your conclusions on their logic and their facts. Lots of people who operate on ignorance would find people like us to be assholes, as we push back against those who push ignorance like you do.

Those who claim to have Asperger’s as an excuse are the ones who are assholes to everyone who isn’t a sycophant.

Here’s the thing, you are making assertions that are orthoganal at best to refute the claims made here. It is said that he is being stupid, and your counter seems to be that he impressed an engineer with his knowledge of which way rockets are supposed to go, so he can’t do stupid things. You demand proof that he is “dim” as a counter to the observation that he doesn’t seem to know what he is doing running a social media company.

I’m sure anyone of even moderate intelligence can spend a couple hours on YouTube and Wikipedia to have an impressive amount of knowledge over pretty much any subject. But that doesn’t give them experience, it doesn’t make them a genius. It just means they they can retain some information at a high level for a while.

Is he a genius because he uses a full flow combustion cycle? Did he design it himself, or did he tell the thousands of engineers to design it for him? Was he drawing up schematics, calculating flow rates, aperture sizes, expansion tolerances, and pressure requirements? Or does he have teams of engineers that actually turn his idea into reality?

Anyone can have an idea. Anyone with an idea with access to billions of dollars can turn that idea into reality.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. You are “stealing” anyone’s work if you hired them to do that work for you. In my business, I have the ability to turn ambiguous client desires into specific instructions for my employees. I am not stealing their work, and anyone who claimed I was would have to show that I claimed to be doing it. OTOH, if I am claiming to be completely and solely responsible for the product, then I should be able to demonstrate my skills directly.

And you know, there’s a slight possibility that I get really lucky and end up with a national chain of shops. I may have enough confidence in my abilities and have the resources to now start a chain of restaurants, and I’d have reason to think that I’d be successful at that.

However, if I decided that I was successful at two business enterprises, and started believing my own hype that I can do anything, so I decide to start a bank, there’s no chance I would be successful without just hiring someone else who is qualified to run it.

That’s where Musk is. He said rockets should go up, so engineers made rockets go up. He said Teslas should go vroom, so engineers made Teslas go vroom(and make random goat and fart noises). But when it comes to social networks, it’s not the engineering that is complicated, it’s the actual direction of the company that is difficult. This is a problem that he can’t just hand over to someone else to solve, he set himself up as the person to solve the problems that he saw in Twitter.

3000

Sam, do you have any substantive response to BeepKillBeep’s observations about Cantrell in particular, other than just throwing a tantrum about what you think is BeepKillBeep’s closed-mindedness about Musk in general? Is there a reason that you think Cantrell should be considered a trustworthy person whose public remarks about a very wealthy and influential associate of his automatically count as reliable evidence?

Personally, I don’t claim to know how smart or well-informed Musk is in real life on any particular subject. And I don’t see why anybody would think that they can know that on the basis of various forms of tech-corporate PR.

3001

Cantrell is just leveraging Agile Bookkeeping.

3002

Thank you. Exactly. That’s not evidence*1 of Musk’s genius, Sam. It is evidence that people are willing to praise Musk in a world where people praise the rich and powerful, often without cause.

I’m completely open to the idea that Musk is a genius. I’ve never seen any actual evidence to that effect. In fact, all the evidence (which I’ve partially listed over and over) I have seen is that he isn’t terribly bright. Not a moron. Maybe a little above average.

*1 Technically, I suppose it is evidence of a kind but it is very weak because it is so subject to many biases.

3003

@Sam_Stone By the way, if I were opposed to Musk on political grounds, then why would I say that Peter Thiel, who is a legitimate fascist, saved his bacon at PayPal? Just Saiyan.