He’s more of a Maxwell Lord - a full-of-himself corporate failson who thinks he can elevate mankind by buying out the superheroes and allying himself with their enemies.
It’s funny to me how often Musk’s fascist outbursts are actually motivated by money and ego.
- Buying Twitter to fight the Woke Mind Virus? No, just an egotistical joke that went too far.
- Fighting for free speech? No, just fighting for Extra Money for Musk.
- Opposed to Gender Ideology? No, his trans child just disowned him and his ex left him for a trans woman.
- NPR is State-Funded Media? No, NPR is just publishing anti-Musk content.
- Soros is evil encarnate? No, Soros just pulled his investments out of Musk business.
Let me guess… By building the most popular electric car in the world? No, that can’t be it… By revolutionizing space access and flying more stuff to orbit than the rest of the world combined, for half the price? Nah, that can’t be it… By building a global satellite constellation that has a monopoly on low latency rural internet around the world? That can’t be it…
I’m out of ideas. It’s a mystery.
He had 340 billion for a short time, on paper, because Tesla stock went nuts. Musk’s net worth is heavily tied to the Tesla stock price. Musk has 412 million shares of Tesla. As of today, that’s worth $70 billion. So everything else he does (SpaceX, Boring company, Neualink, Solar City, Twitter, etc) is worth roughly $100 billion.
In late 2021, Tesla briefly jumped to $407. Musk owned sligtly more stock then, and his Tesla holdings were worth about $200 billion. That’s a $140 billion drop in his Tesla holdings, which almost fully explains the decline in his wealth.
In terms of what it’s cost him to own Twitter, it’s hard to say. He only put up part of the money himself. $13 billion was in loans to Twitter that Musk is not personally on the hook for (but will make it harder for Twitter to turn around), and 7 billion came from equity investors which again Twitter is on the hook for. I think Musk coughed up in total about $22 billion, mostly from sales of Tesla stock. If Twitter went to zero, that’s what he’d lose. Estimates are that Twitter is worth about half of the $44 billion he paid. So if he sold out today, he’d lose about $11 billion. He gains and loses that much in a week when Tesla stock moves.
BTW, Musk’s net worth was already down to $220 billion by the time he bought Twitter. And the drop since is almost purely due to the drop in price of Tesla shares. You can debate how much Musk’s Twitter adventures caused that, but as I’ve pointed out before the entire EV industry went into a slump around that time.
But if you want to attribute the fall in Musk’s wealth solely to his Twitter purchase, then it dropped from $220 billion to $170 billion. But really, it’s an industry-wide downturn. Rivian fell from $40 to $13 in the same period. Lucid fell from $21 to $7. Nio, one of China’s biggest EV makers, fell from $24 to $8.
In the meantime, once Starship makes it to orbit and back safely, SpaceX’s valuation will jump and Musk will be worth a lot more again. Twitter is almost a sideshow.
Almost?
The thing about Musk & Twitter is that he has been running the thing in absolutely bizarre and childish fashion almost from the moment he inked the deal. Firing 75% of the staff is the single most normal thing he’s done with the company.
The rest of it, from the having checks to not having checks to having grey or blue or gold checks, paying for checks, or not paying for them, or having Musk personally paying for your check, labeling PBS “government controlled media” then agreeing to silence Erdogan’s critics immediately before an election… it’s looney tunes.
If you had a job you were depending on for rent and your kid’s insulin, and your boss was acting like this, you’d freak, and for good reason. It isn’t normal. If you had a friend acting like this with his Delicatessen, you’d want to sit him down and have a serious heart to heart because he’s destroying his business and needs help. Like “professional help” kind of help.
Nothing worth $22 billion is a complete sideshow. But it’s about 10-15% of Musk’s net worth, so for him it’s ‘almost’ a sideshow in terms of his wealth. Moving Tesla stock by 30% is worth more to him.
Firing the staff appears to have been a good thing. Twitter is running fine, and after Musk did his layoffs other tech companies followed suit and laid off huge numbers of employees. It appears that a decade of almost free money caused a huge amount of bloat in Silicon Valley.
But I agree on the other stuff. A lot of unforced errors. But I see this as part of Musk’s personality that also contributes to his success in other areas. He has done a lot of ‘crazy’ things before that turned out to be right. He lost his top rocket engineer at SpaceX because the guy thought Musk’s plans were ‘nuts’. He’s since admitted that Musk was right. His aspergery doggedness and lack of social skills are big liabilities in some contexts to be sure, but they also may be why he has succeeded when others didn’t.
Still, that may not make him a great fit to run a social media company. Musk benefits from filters, and when he owns the company he has none.
Despite all the ‘agile’ jokes at my expense, I do think this is Musk applying his strategy of just throwing lots of things at the wall to see what sticks. I suspect that it’s a mistake to do that type of development with a social media company as opposed to in the back office with a bunch of engineers, but maybe not. Maybe this will cause him to zero in on the right policies faster, and the pain it caused will eventually be forgotten. Or maybe it will wreck Twitter. The jury is still out.
If the person who acted ‘crazy’ had been acting like this his whole life, and now had the most successful delicatessen chain in the world, I doubt that I’d really be lecturing him on his behaviour. I’d assume that either he knows something I don’t, or that his behaviour is part of a psychology that led to his success, or at worst is irrelevant to his success.
No, he didn’t. Companies that he managed did those things - they were collective efforts by large groups of people. And sure, he deserves a lot of credit for his leadership, but saying that he deserves sole credit for those admittedly impressive achievements is like saying, I don’t know, that General George Meade won the Battle of Gettysburg. He didn’t; the Union did. He just happened to be in charge at the time.
That’s a lot of maybes for a $50B company. The thing about social media is that there’s no infrastructure to bank on when things go south. MySpace was once valued at $12B and isn’t worth anything anymore, and it isn’t like the parent company was carving it up and selling off the assets piece by piece, it’s just not worth anything.
I never said he deserved sole credit. I was simply snarkily responding to your question about how he could possibly have so much money.
But lots of space companies are out there, and they all have good engineers. Yet only SoaceX managed to break through the old paradigm. Jeff Bezos started his space company at the same time as Musk, and look where he is in comparison.
I suggest you read “Liftoff” by Eric Berger if you have any questions about Musk’s role in the success of SpaceX.
He seems to have gone mostly nuts since Grimes (or whoever it was) left him. Or, probably better interpreted, he started to go nuts and it pushed away those around him.
He’s on the Howard Hughes trajectory.
But, how he is now doesn’t mean that he wasn’t better, before. It just means that he should be trying to find a trustworthy non-rubber-stamp-for-the-rich psychiatric doctor, rather than posting inanities on Twitter.
There are a lot of maybes because the future is unpredictable. Anyone telling you they know the putcome at Twitter is lying or deluded. I can see possible red flags, and also possible opportunities. And a new CEO is coming in, with unpredictable results.
But it’s a great point that social media companies can be ephemeral because they are mostly virtual. A lot of the value is in intangibles like user experience and the presence of good content, and that can be fleeting.
Grimes, or “Grimey”, as she likes to be called.
So why has he basically been living in the offices and devoting so much time to it? If it were really a sideshow, he’d glance at it for an hour every other Tuesday and then go back to running his actually valuable and productive companies.
I just meant in terms of his net worth. Clearly Twitter is important to him.
Which is why whatever his abilities at running companies based on tangible products - SpaceX, Tesla, whatever - do not translate to running a media company. He seems to misunderstand the fundamental nature of a social media company; the users are the product, not the customers. And based on the way he’s treated his employees (something of which I have some personal knowledge), he’s a completely toxic, horrible boss who has no idea how to manage a workforce.
As far as your oft-repeated claims that the left now hates him because he’s “left the tribe”, and we’ve only started attacking him since he bought Twitter, I can say that I was only tangentially aware of him before that. Since then, he’s had a giant stage to reveal just exactly what kind of man he is. Thanks to the magic of social media, we can see him accommodating authoritarian regimes, banning accounts critical of him, shutting down journalists, making immature 420 and poop jokes, throwing public temper tantrums. If we’re critical of him, it’s because he’s shown himself to be a narcissistic, thin-skinned, arrogant, and utterly toxic human being. He’s a flaming asshole, and thanks to Twitter, we now all see it.
There has never been a scientist as rich as Musk, ergo he’s the greatest scientist who’s ever lived. If they were as smart as him, they’d have as much, if not more, money.
But of course the real reason little sci-fi dorks worship him is because he virtue signals like a motherfucker for their side. All it took was him jabbing ((Soros)) for our little sycophant to come running full sprint to defend his god again.
Elmo is now stanning the Neo-Nazi Texas mall shooter and claiming that just because he had multiple swastika and SS tattoos doesn’t mean he was racist.
JOKE: What do you call nine Nazis and Elon Musk?
ANSWER: Ten Nazis.
Wait… why on earth is his opinion on this subject relevant enough to be reported in the media?
That’s a serious question: I don’t understand why a reputable journalist would air a random celebrity’s opinions on a subject to which they had no pretension of expertise.
Attempting to answer my own question via the CNBC website: it’s an interview, and for whatever reason editing is no longer a thing, so what ever he says makes it into the final cut. (I’m a bit hampered by my refusal to click through to watch the interview.)
Huh, six months ago you were presenting this as a simultaneous general trend in the tech industry, not as some kind of Twitter-led management revolution.
But now that you want to rhetorically boost your pitch for Musk’s claims to brilliance, suddenly the notion of large-scale IT layoffs last fall was all Musk’s idea, and other Silicon Valley tech companies merely “followed suit” in his wake. Uh-huh.
Close, the value is user attention, which can be captured by good user experience and good content, but when it’s gone, it’s gone and then the value is zero.
Oh, you mean they’ve fixed their massive unpreparedness problems for compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act, which they were warned about less than three weeks ago because they have less than four months to get into compliance?
Then there are also the reported issues of continued firings, constant scrambling to put out fires and meet ever-changing requirements, unstable user verification and security features, etc.
I’m not sure you’ve made a persuasive case that Musk’s Twitter at present is meeting reasonable criteria for “running fine”. I mean, maybe all you meant is that you personally don’t notice any current problems with viewing tweets, but that would be setting the performance bar rather low, IMHO.