Musk basically success is based entirely on the following,
He has gobs of money
He has a bunch of wild crazy ideas that he’s not afraid to pursue (because he has gobs of money).
What usually happens is that he has a wild crazy idea (let’s build a giant vacuume filled tube from LA to Frisco). He gets a bunch of people together, they try to work out how to build the thing, make a couple of prototypes run some tests and realize that it is indeed a wild crazy idea but is utterly unworkeable, and so he loses a couple of million in pocket change and moves on.
In a couple of cases he had a wild crazy idea that the people he gets together are actually able to implement and we end up with Tesla and SpaceX.
Now enter twitter. Unlike his other endeavors, twitter is entirely virtual, if you have a wild crazy idea (say blue checks for everyone). There isn’t that step where you figure out how to make it, make prototypes etc. If you want blue checks get a few web portal programmers give them a couple of days and bam you’ve got blue checks. So his crazy ideas suddenly become instant reality without any sort of forced feasibility check. So the reasons its a stupid idea don’t become apparent before it’s fait accompli.
Or to Channel Jeff Goldbloom. Musk in the past had always been constrained by what he could do, so before now he never to think about what he should do.
Preamble : I don’t like Musk, I don’t use Twitter, and I’m enjoying the fireworks like everyone else.
But I think it’s sad when we have a unanimous prognosis, so I will offer these contrarian points, in no particular order:
Two things that Musk has learned from Trump are that making a fool of oneself is surprisingly harmless, and that damaging the foundations of society has surprisingly few consequences. He will still have a fan club when this is over.
Real-time blind experimentation with lots of U-turns can also be labeled Extreme Agile Management. Some will take inspiration from this.
Having users pay for access is a good thing. The whole Internet can’t run on ads, it’s unsustainable and (because of the customer/product inversion) toxic. I don’t agree with Musk’s motivations, but if a social media service has value, it should get its money from something other than ads.
The blue check / grey check thing will settle into an equilibrium. Pretty soon – if the company survives long enough – there will be a way to tell the authentics from the parodies, just like before.
It’s possible that Twitter will still be here 2 years from now, ironically because it’s become essential to the “lords” and to mainstream media.
The FTC and other regulators will run into the same problem that the local authorities ran into when they required the Fremont Tesla factory to shut down at the height of the pandemic: fines are ineffective against eccentric billionaires.
There will definitely be devoted sycophants making weird rationalizations about how Musk’s latest bizarre behavior or unhinged outbursts are part of some master plan, or excusable due to his self-diagnosed autism, and so forth. However, I suspect the journalists, politicians, and investors who have long praised and placed faith in his every pronouncement are going to be a lot more circumspect to the extent that they will even entertain his blatherings.
True, this. The enforcement of regulatory agencies are largely predicated upon people behaving in rational fashion and accepting the ultimate authority of government. When you can buy the government—or at least a significant number of legislators—you create your own authority. Musk has been more forthright in flexing that muscle in actually saying the words instead of hiding behind lawyers, but ultimately he’s gotten away with a lot of things that mere multi-millionaires could never hope to slide past regulators and judicial authority. However, now that he seems to be on a quest to shed himself of his excess ‘wealth’—most of which is purely speculative valuation anyway—he may find that he has fewer ‘friends’ and less ability to squirm his way out of his legal obligations.
It’s not the foundations of society he has to worry about, though. It’s the fact that he’s scaring off the people with the money. It’s that he comes off like he’s incompetent at actually running the company since he’s causing it to lose so much money so quickly.
You can call it that, but it’s clearly an order of magnitude beyond that. There’s a reason why you don’t see other companies do that—let alone admit that they’re willing to let the company go bankrupt to keep trying things. People don’t want to pay for things that aren’t a good return.
It’s a good thing if you want a small userbase. People don’t like to pay to communicate, and will find a free alternative when paywalls get put up. And they already avoid paywalls for news (which is why newspapers struggle). You need investors, not users, to pay. And advertising is the model that gets a ton of investment, since the investors get something out of it.
But pretty much the only way to do that is to go back to what they were doing before, which again makes Musk look like an idiot for even trying this. He genuinely didn’t understand the purpose of authenticating accounts or why it takes a large staff to do so.
Sure, but it has to survive, and survive in a form that is still actually relevant, and not have something else replace it.
In addition to what @Stranger_On_A_Train said, there’s the simple fact that the FTC is more powerful, and Twitter is being weakened by every action Musk takes. Musk is already feeling the financial pressure, which is why he’s having public freakouts.
The FTC can’t take Twitter down on its own. But it wouldn’t be working alone on that goal.
Real-time blind experimentation with lots of U-turns isn’t “management” at all, agile or otherwise. It’s more appropriately labeled “chaos”, and nobody wants to be part of an unpredictable, chaotic environment.
But if the value of a social media service derives entirely from the content provided by its users, then having your sole value providers pay for the privilege of providing that value is a very bad thing. Just ask the folks who thought pay-to-post on the SDMB was a great idea.
If so, it will be in spite of Musk, not because of him. He’s been fighting this idea from the start.
If so, it will be in spite of Musk, not because of him.
This is true for some regulatory agencies, like the SEC. It is not true for the FTC, and it is especially not true in the context of already operating under a strict consent decree. We know this because every single executive at Twitter who can be held accountable for compliance with the consent decree has quit in the last three days. They did not quit because their noncompliance will result in fines against Twitter. They quit because noncompliance will result in criminal charges and the threat of imprisonment against themselves personally.
The situation with the FTC and Twitter is very, very different compared to, say, the FCC or the FDA looking at a procedural checklist and reminding a company it needs to file a report or something. If Musk thinks he can flout the consent decree and bluster his way past it the way he did before, he’s going to get himself into serious trouble.
As everybody knows, it’s rarely worth you while to pay for an internet service, because some newer company is always going to offer basically the same thing for free. And when that company starts charging, well, some new sucker will come along. The internet is basically a reverse pyramid scheme.
I agree with this, and they were right to leave; but for Musk himself, in today’s U.S., that only means that he would have to appeal all the way to the Republican-controlled Supreme Court, or at worst delay things until the next Republican president can sign – or tweet – a pardon.
Minor fairly insignificant detail, but what’s up with Musk’s “Short answer is that original insulin, discovered in 1921 (not 1923), is inexpensive, costing as little as $25.” I mean, the nit-pick of “1921 (not 1923)”? Is that supposed to be read as a correction of Bernie’s words and a “I know better than you!”, because, if so, Musk must have failed reading comprehension, as Bernie wrote that the patent was sold in 1923 (January 23, 1923, to be precise), which is absolutely correct.
I have to laugh at the “make twitter a bank” idea – given the chaos – who will trust putting money in twitter? Not to mention even more government oversight.
Well, George Carlin said, “If you nail two things together that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you.”
I think that’s fine and dandy when it leads to things like hats with cup holders. They look silly in a way that you might consider fun if you’re into the spirit of the thing, and they’re definitely useful because they leave your hands free to clap when your pitcher strikes a guy out or whatever.
When you want to nail Twitter and a bank together, well, I’m at a loss. I have no freakin’ clue why or how a bank should or could be nailed to Twitter. And yeah, I’m not going to trust what little money I have to a company that to all outward appearances is circling the drain.
Strongly disagree. By doing that, we’ve got a lot of posts carefully examining the content and providing deeper understanding.
Being contrary for its own sake could also be called the scientific method.
I won’t claim to be an expert on insulin, but I believe there are constant “updates” impacting how the body absorbs it, how long it lasts, reducing allergic reactions, etc. These all require R&D, manufacturing updates, clinical trials, etc.
It’s a bit like saying that new cars shouldn’t be more expensive than a model T. Even accounting for inflation, they are vastly more complex and so comparing prices is nonsensical.
That does not mean that the margins on insulin are not off the charts, however.
I mean, yes, I understand all that. It’s just Musk’s weird nitpicky “correction”, which was not a correction to anything actually said by Bernie, that stuck out for me.
