“It was just a colossal cyber security phishing test. We’re very disappointed so many of you fell for it.”
This feels like it could be the start of the breakup between Trump and Elmo. I expect his Muskness to lash out over his decrees being ignored and do something that’ll piss off EVERYONE, like threatening to have Big Balls stop Social Security payouts unless he gets his way.
HHS advice re Elmo’s email; if you choose to respond, "assume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly.”
If Big Balls knew COBOL.
Seconded. Also love this and it makes me laugh.
It isn’t. Musk is a mediocre manager at best. But he’s also an organizational genius. Noah Smith:
Seth Abramson could not build SpaceX, or Tesla, or any of the things Musk has built, no matter how much money someone handed him. Neither could I, dear reader, and neither could you. Neither, I think, could Terence Tao, or any of the other highest-IQ supergenius mathematicians on the planet.1 Any of us could spend a lifetime and burn a trillion dollars and probably not end up with anything remotely resembling Musk’s high-tech industrial behemoths.
Why would we fail? Even with zero institutional constraints in our way, we would fail to identify the best managers and the best engineers. Even when we did find them, we’d often fail to convince them to come work for us — and even if they did, we might not be able to inspire them to work incredibly hard, week in and week out. We’d also often fail to elevate and promote the best workers and give them more authority and responsibilities, or ruthlessly fire the low performers. We’d fail to raise tens of billions of dollars at favorable rates to fund our companies. We’d fail to negotiate government contracts and create buzz for consumer products. And so on.
In the article Smith describes the things that Musk has done that others have not. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs shy away from industry because of its many challenges: they gravitate to software and wonder how the hell Musk did what he did.
As for Twitter, let’s not forget that Musk tried hard to back out of the deal: he only went through with it because he was losing a lawsuit, badly. And he was only losing the lawsuit because he carelessly signed a very dumb contract, dumb for him, good for Twitter shareholders at the time. So yeah, prudence isn’t a large part of Musk’s skill set. Nor is there any indication that moving fast and breaking things will work out at the federal level, beyond the breaking things part. But Smith hasn’t argued otherwise.
Smith thinks that ripping up national institutions is bad, and I agree.
As much as I despise Noah Smith, it must be noted that Seth Abramson is also a massive grifter and attention whore. He labels himself as a “Musk Biographer” while conveniently eliding the fact that… he hasn’t published any Musk biography yet. The biography is “upcoming” and has been “upcoming” for years. There’s been no announced title, no announced publisher, no announced timeline, in fact, his official books webpage doesn’t even contain the word Musk on it.
Nothing I’ve read of his opinions regarding Musk have been any more informed than any other random Joe and he’s aggressive in throwing around his title to cover for this.
And yet, when Musk’s loyal long-time personal assistant asked for more authority and responsibilities in view of the increasing size of the businesses he was running, he told her to take a week off and he’d see if he could function without her help. When she returned, he fired her.
Elmo is not only a horrendously terrible manager, he’s also a total asshole. And he’s technically incompetent – his demand to Twitter employees to submit samples of their code for his inspection to see how good they were was laughable nonsense and a complete misunderstanding of the priorities in software design. His demand to federal civil servants to list “five things you did last week” was equally ludicrous. His constant meddling in the minutiae of products and policy is almost consistently counterproductive.
The man is an idiot, and apparently so is Noah Smith. The only thing Elmo knows how to do is hire good engineers and then take credit for their work.
It’s also a mind-boggling violation of operational security. Even insofar as it makes any kind of sense to take dynamically structured code and its associated libraries and render them in something like a linear, readable form to be printed out, they are managed in secure repositories for a reason. But now you’ve got all these hard copies floating around, with zero visibility on reproduction and distribution? This is just an epic level of technical ignorance.
I mean, what the hell would a top level exec even know what the lowly code monkeys are up to? I write code. I write tests for that code. My peers review it. So far, so good.
My boss does not review my code, he/she reviews results. His/her boss doesn’t review code, they review financial results. Their boss does not review code… ad infinitum, all the way up to Elon, who doesn’t understand code.
I’d turn in something written in Malbolge or Brainfuck. And get a new job.
Smith is a mix of about 50% the dumbest opinions you’ve ever heard, and 50% the most obvious opinions ever heard, presented as an earth-shattering insight, usually with the smirk of the knowing mediocre.
The latter is where his “Only fools think Elon is incompetent” falls. It’s basically, “if he’s so dumb, why is he taking apart your government?” His assumption appears to be that only a smart guy could bribe the most corrupt man in the world to give him access to destroy things he can’t understand. I trust we all see the hole in that reasoning.
To be fair, there’s an underlying truth that guys like Trump and Musk shouldn’t be considered stupid, in the same way we don’t consider sharks stupid because they can’t do long division. It’s extremely dangerous to dismiss the threat of hungry sharks because they’re “stupid”. They’re good at being sharks, they’ve been doing shark stuff since before trees existed, but they have no real intelligence at all. But that doesn’t really work coming from Smith, because we know Smith is a rube who is heavily bought into the idea of Musk’s secret genius.
In conclusion, Smith is a moron who mainly plays word games with the world’s most obvious insights, and even while he’s expounding on the obvious, he still manages to fuck it up the majority of the time. At least Tom Friedman had the “brown-man-in-the-street” gimmick going for him. Smith’s whole thing is that he was apparently born yesterday and has found a large audience of people who apparently share the same birthday.
The less said about Abramson the better. I followed him for a while before it was clear how full of shit he is. There are a lot of grifters on Twitter, so it’s important to be critical of big-name accounts.
Look I’m not trashing anyone for listening to guys like Smith or Abramson. People who live on Twitter are bound to have a good take now and then, simply due to the law of large numbers. But if you don’t follow them, or follow people who critique them, it’s hard to detect that you’re watching the proverbial stopped clock that’s right twice a day.
Musk isn’t trying to understand anything except which employees can be bullied. That is the entire point of this performance. He doesn’t care what people are working on. His goal is to have a smaller labor pool that doesn’t contest his authority.
I see those pieces as a misapprehension of the actual issue.
Musk isn’t a genius. Nor a brilliant manager, either. Reasonably smart and can motivate at least some subset of his employees. Great con man, though. But that’s not the relevant part.
Musk may not be a genius inventor or manager or whatever. But he desperately wants to be seen as one. That’s the actual insight.
If you treat him as a genius by appealing to his intellect or rationality, you’ll be disappointed. Remember that Thai cave rescue? He offered what he thought was a brilliant idea only to be rebuffed by the actual experts. His reaction? Pedo guy.
Instead, you appeal to his vanity. If you try to treat him like a really smart guy with facts and figures, his inferiority complex kicks in, and he lashes out. So, don’t do that. Put on an act in front of him that he’s brilliant so you protect your actual competent people who are doing the real work in the background.
That’s the same deal with Trump. During his first term, world leaders initially approached him as if he actually cared about his responsibilities. Likewise, every few weeks the Press breathlessly awaited “the moment he became President”, i.e. when he finally figured out the awesome weight of responsibility it entailed.
Nope. Putin had him figured out years ago. Appeal to his vanity. Suck up to him. Let him be seen as ‘winning’ while you do your own thing.
People, even detractors, always seem to overestimate the personal abilities of these men. Don’t. They may be dangerous but that does not mean treating them on their terms is the solution either.
Nobody has any idea if this is true. That’s just a thing that rich people and their fans tell themselves to justify why they should have amounts of wealth and power that other people dont have.
Everything else in that column depends on you taking this unproven assertion as an article of faith. This is just Smith’s typical hackery of saying a thing that sounds sorta true and obvious, and spinning an entire column out of it, relying on the reality that his sympathetic obvious won’t think about it too carefully.
If you really want to understand Elon Musk and his fanboys like Noah Smith, here’s a much more insightful blog by a much more intelligent author: The Myth of the Secret Genius by Brian Klaas. He’s an author who is really worth your time.
I saw this on a Danish news site. They wrote that the petition had been signed by 230000 and that it was over the 500 that is needed to get the parlament to debate it.
No, this is ridiculous. It would sound ridiculous applied to any, more legible skill. Nobody is out there saying “it’s impossible to know whether I could shoot 3s better than Lebron James or perform open heart surgery better than a surgeon or sing better than Taylor Swift”. We correctly clock that anyone trying to make those arguments are confidently, ignorantly delusional.
But because the average intellectual prides themselves on their ignorance of the actual realities of building and running businesses, we’re allowed to entertain a fantasy world where CEOing is just a laughably trivial set of activities and only by luck or deceit does anyone get there and it’s always undeserved.
We have empirical numbers of how many people wash out at every step of the process and how gruelling the path to the top is. We feel perfectly fine making fun of terrible CEOs for their “obvious incompetence” without fully appreciating that even the very worst CEOs got there by far exceeding their peers throughout multiple rounds of selection. It’s like when shows take the very worst NBA player and match them up against some guy who thinks he’s “pretty good” amongst his friend group and it quickly becomes obvious that the two are simply playing different games and it’s like watching a toddler play keepaway against an adult.
(For context, I’ve previously written about what the skill of CEOs are and why CEOs are the way they are).
Yes, blah blah luck and yes, blah blah, Musk today has a laughably trivial workload and is largely kept away from his companies but that doesn’t exclude Noah Smith’s very basic point which is that the average person could no more build SpaceX and Tesla tomorrow than they could climb Mount Everest or swim the English Channel or build a quantum computer, it’s something that straightforwardly requires training and skill and discipline.
Musk is very very good at swinging a hammer. SpaceX has done very well, and proven itself to benefit greatly from a lot of hammer swinging. Tesla, at least until the Cybertruck, has similarly benefitted from being the subject of excellent hammer blows.
Musk thinks that everything does better being hit by a hammer. If you blowup a SpaceX rocket, you get a lot of good information for the next build which is already in process and will be ready in 6 months. You blow the CDC to smithereens, you’re not building a newer better CDC in 6 months.
Elmo has now lost the support of David “the Jews are alien lizard people” Icke.
He makes a lot of sense there.