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I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there

• ngoilapites 4y ago
  When you say "I still think Elon is a smart guy" every every time you write about your departure statement, you just communicate lots of things: too much respect and consideration for despicable actors just conveys fear.
• locallost 4y ago
  You have in fact left Twitter, your account was just suspended. Crazy times...
• hermitcrab 4y ago
  >Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out to be So how do you explain his targetting of Fauci? Or the horrible things he said about that cave diver?
• BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
  Dude, he BANNED YOU. He's running this site like a banana republic. How many stupid things in a row does Elon Musk have to do before you realize this guy isn't wired quite right?
• bambax 4y ago
  > I'm not leaving Twitter Yes you are. The smart guy that works on cars and rockets and who's not a villain and who's a political moderate and a totally reasonable guy, just made you. > I would be delighted to go back to using Twitter regularly It's not your decision to make, apparently.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• bloopernova 4y ago
  How do you feel about his "anti-woke" behaviour? His banning of journalists? His tweets with nazi coded language like "88"? Would you return to a site where the owner uses his considerable power/money to promote fascism?
  • onryowave 4y ago
  • drusepth 4y ago
    > His tweets with nazi coded language like "88"? Do you have links to these tweets? I couldn't find any from a brief perusal of this recent tweets.
    • fragmede 4y ago
      > I wonder what Earth will be like 88 million years from now https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596439328338890752 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596439328338890752
• cmatthias 4y ago
  > I still think Elon is a smart guy. > Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media. Given his behavior and the results over the last ~month or however long he's owned Twitter, how can both of these possibly be true?
  • systemvoltage 4y ago
    My prediction is that Elon will realize how badly he is fucking up things and change. I was listening to All-in-podcast and there was a really good comment that was made - "He[Elon] needs to just get back to landing rockets on barges" which I agree, moderating and micromanaging a massive social media platform doesn't feel like a good use of his time. Edit: annnnd he reversed the whole thing and apologized: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832
    • cmatthias 4y ago
      Wow, what an absolute moron. If this is how he runs his other companies, it’s amazing anyone stays for more than a month.
• xnx 4y ago
  You can fix policies, but trust is very difficult to build back. Elon is very lucky there's not a viable alternative to Twitter, otherwise there would be a true Myspace to Facebook style exodus.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• baxtr 4y ago
  > seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. Would be great to see you being more active on HN again!
  • pg 4y ago
    Thanks, but as I learned when I was running HN, being a regular user of a forum (which the moderator necessarily is) and writing essays are fundamentally incompatible. If you're known to be a regular user of a forum, then when someone says something about you and you don't reply, it reads as a tacit admission that they're correct. And when you write essays people say all kinds of things about you. The combination is a disaster. Forum users can sense that you're compelled to respond, and it encourages them to pick fights with you. Back when I used to moderate HN, hitting publish on an essay was usually followed by several hours of saying various forms of "No, what I said was..." Life is much better now that I never look at the HN threads on them.
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      Rule #1 of any forum is don't moderate the forum that you are active on. Musk is finding out the hard way why this is the case. Happy to see your post here though! Edit: and while we have you here briefly, Happy Holidays!
      • panarky 4y ago
        pg will almost certainly be reinstated because he's a high-profile supporter. But just because the new owner makes exceptions to his ridiculous anti-free-speech policy for high-profile supporters doesn't make it better. In fact, selective enforcement of batshit policies makes it all much worse.
        • jacquesm 4y ago
          Yes, but it would be folly to continue to invest into a forum that is run in such a capricious way.
      • 4y ago
• droopyEyelids 4y ago
  I hope you write a blog about the process of staying off twitter. It's a system that has a lot of psychological rewards and I believe quitting it is almost like changing an addictive habit.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• ragebol 4y ago
  What i hoped he would he'd do was to find another Gwynne Shotwell and have them run the company while taking his advice and kindly ignore it when it makes sense. Alas, I don't see something like this panning out, that future is gone.
  • toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Tom Zhu, Tesla’s China president, is likely to be head of Tesla Automotive in the near future.
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      Where did you pick that tidbit up?
• jacquesm 4y ago
  Fair enough. I don't think he will be able to salvage this and I've deleted my account to reduce the temptation to return. A reputation is not like a piece of software that you fix and then re-run as though it never broke in the first place. Elon has utterly wrecked his reputation over the last couple of months (and probably longer than that) and it is getting worse, not better. Edit: I guess Paul won't be going back to Twitter because his account just got suspended... See for yourself: https://twitter.com/paulg/ https://twitter.com/paulg/
  • canadaduane 4y ago
    Do you have a Mastodon account yet? I'd like to continue to follow you.
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      I'm still on the fence about what to do. As I've written elsewhere today I'm not currently in the best of health and social media takes up a lot of time and energy, also I am wondering whether I should simply not let that go and concentrate on more real world stuff. I do still blog every now and then and I'm on HN in waves depending on how much free time I have.
      • tayo42 4y ago
        > social media takes up a lot of time and energy, also I am wondering whether I should simply not let that go and concentrate on more real world stuff. I dont see why more people arent doing this. How much value are these places really providing you in your life. I think its mostly fomo. Maybe theres a gem somewhere in there.
        • jacquesm 4y ago
          I've gotten a ton of mileage out of social media, met lots of interesting people, made friends from all over the world, made start-up investments (some good, some bad), helped people, have been helped by people and in general found that there are interesting stories everywhere. But that was when I was still swimming in time and now the trade-off is different. As I wrote, I'm on the fence, but the value is/was definitely there.
• martythemaniak 4y ago
  I don't think Musk has any negative feedback loops anymore, it's highly unlikely said there is a single person who can tell him when he's screwing up. Or maybe he needs something of Twitter going bust magnitude to get feedback now. I hope that happens so that he can go back to making great stuff again
  • bombolo 4y ago
    Great things like digging tunnels to put a few cars in them? :D The man sells hype, and has always done so. It seems the mask is falling.
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    That seems to be mostly because he's firing anybody that is even mildly critical of him.
  • thrown1212 4y ago
    Any first degree negative feedback loops. But reality has a way of poking its head in, like getting booed in public forums that should have been adoring you. Fortunately second and third degree feedback loops are notoriously stupid, and wrong, and they’re the problem there, not you.
• HellDunkel 4y ago
• rihegher 4y ago
  I think adding support for ActivityPub to twitter would be a smart move but that would require a complete U-turn
  • zimpenfish 4y ago
    I think Twitter would find itself de-federated from a lot of the Fediverse pretty quickly as long as Ol' Muskie is in charge.
• bdn_ 4y ago
  Hey Paul, legitimate question. What actions from Musk would it take for you to stop supporting him?
  • mola 4y ago
    Becoming poor and powerless I'd bet... Any of us plebs behaving so erratically and cruel wouldn't get support from the like of PG. But the rich sympathies with the rich. So for now Elon is eccentric and smart, not mad and dangerous
• hakanderyal 4y ago
  I'm starting to believe being a Twitter user is the worst thing that happened to Elon.
  • raverbashing 4y ago
    Sounds like it's a theme with certain people, interestingly enough
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • mcv 4y ago
      Yeah, I don't think excessive Twitter use is healthy. Or at least not for a certain type of person.
• secos 4y ago
  > Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media. This argument made sense a month ago. Unfortunately he really hasn't shown any improvement since then that would lead me to agree with you on that point. It's now a situation where he has to either find enough new people who agree with whatever his approach is or /win people back/ - both of those are quite a bit harder than keeping people who already loved the app. I also hope he - or someone - is able to recover Twitter. But I'm not betting on it at this point.
  • davidgerard 4y ago
    looking forward to the Morgan Stanley era of Twitter ownership really, the first job is to put an adult in charge
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      That moment may be much closer than we think.
  • raspberry1337 4y ago
    Twitter has less bots yets more activity than ever. In what dimension do these Hacker news posters live?
    • videah 4y ago
      I have never had as many spam bots in my DMs and replies as I have right now.
      • antifa 4y ago
        Twitter keeps emailing me about how I need to log in and look at fake notifications I've already seen. I verified I was already unsubed from all the various fake notifications they generate (including the specific fake ones they generated).
      • drusepth 4y ago
• zelias 4y ago
  In what context does a "smart guy" truly not realize that growing industrial manufacturing companies ("cars and rockets") from scratch is a fundamentally different challenge than running a mature web-only social media company? Is he simply blinded by success?
  • themitigating 4y ago
    You can be smart and impulsive at the same time. Remember, he tried to get out of the purchase probably after thinking about it.
    • zelias 4y ago
      This is fair, but you would think that once he realized what kind of bag he was holding, he would also possess the clarity of mind to realize a need to step back and learn something about the internal workings of the industry, let alone the company he had just acquired without any due diligence. If Elon had simply sat back and done "almost nothing" after the purchase, instead taking the time to really learn about something he had just bought, he would not be in this PR firestorm, let alone getting forced to sell off billions in TSLA stock.
    • neltnerb 4y ago
      He had plenty of time to think about it before deciding to fire all the people he fired in the cruelest way possible. It may have been satisfying to him because he has a caricature in his head of who they are and what they did and it made his fans happy. But impulsive? No, there was plenty of time for smart to override impulsive here. This is something -- arbitrary, chaotic, intentionally cruel -- but it isn't impulsive.
• ragtete 4y ago
  "Eccentric" is not the best way to describe him. He's full of hate, vengeful, reactionary, abusive, and surrounded by yes men/women. You've slowly been piecing each of them together over the past month, but clearly still don't get it. I don't know why you're still giving so much benefit of the doubt, other than the fact that he's also a billionaire.
• bombolo 4y ago
  > His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. You mean hiring engineers to work on cars and rockets?
  • speakfreely 4y ago
    Organizing the efforts of large teams of smart people is one of the most high value activities you can do in our society. Edit: not saying that's happening at Twitter, but it has demonstrably occurred at Tesla and SpaceX.
    • amelius 4y ago
      However, it seemed that Elon's mind was more with manipulating Bitcoin rates, and then buying and changing Twitter the last few years. Tesla and SpaceX must be run by other people, which investors and Elon conveniently keep out of the picture.
      • speakfreely 4y ago
        Elon is certainly laser-focused on self-promotion, no doubt. I suspect most of the value he will deliver at those companies is in the past, but that doesn't detract from it.
        • Apocryphon 4y ago
          Perhaps founders are not all that different from the companies they run. In time, bloat and complacency will twist them into unrecognizable shapes, until they too are disrupted by upstarts. Why should Musk be any different?
        • concordDance 4y ago
          > Elon is certainly laser-focused on self-promotion, no doubt. Strongly doubt. But we will have to wait until he's no longer relevant before we get a good view of this man's inner workings.
    • croes 4y ago
• themitigating 4y ago
  To be a great villian you have to be smart. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to get support and would likely make too many mistakes.
• Dracophoenix 4y ago
  > Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. There's HN and Reddit. It helps to dog-food your own investments every now and then.
  • concordDance 4y ago
    Good lord, don't recommend reddit in general! Recommend specific subreddits! r/all and similar are populated by politically active teens with no understanding of context or nuance or how to have a level headed discussion.
• ignostic 4y ago
  Not leaving Twitter, just not reading or posting and using alternative platforms. Not to play word police, but I think that's what people meant when they said 'leaving'. But if you mean that it's not necessarily forever, I understand what you're saying.
• jackmott 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lph 4y ago
  It's astonishing how much benefit of the doubt Elon Musk gets from his cult of personality. Whether or not he's smart, the things he's doing at Twitter are /glaringly/ not smart from a business perspective: He's driven away advertisers, alienated users, crippled system resilience by firing so many engineers, and set the stage for dozens of lawsuits that will run the gamut from employment law to SEC oversight to EU compliance. Twitter is burning, and it's increasingly hard to see how genius Elon Musk is going to salvage it when he keeps throwing gasoline on the fire. If you were presented this whole debacle in an anonymized format, without Elon Musk's name attached, how would you judge these actions?
  • AnonCoward42 4y ago
    Not everyone that does not hate Elon Musk is following a personality cult. I have not much of an opinion of Elon Musk in general and kinda ignore the person himself, but what he did to Twitter is awesome for everyone, but the woke bubble. It's definitely fun to watch it.
    • VerminOctopus1 4y ago
      I think the fact that pg himself is frustrated and pausing his Twitter presence is evidence enough that this is not awesome for everyone except those in the “woke bubble”. Paul Graham is very obviously not a “woke” guy. You are very obviously inside an “anti-woke” bubble yourself if this nonsense is your main takeaway from Musk’s tactics as Twitter CEO.
      • AnonCoward42 4y ago
        It is evidence that Paul Graham is frustrated with Twitter politics. Now using him as evidence for anything else is more of a personality cult around Paul Graham. > You are very obviously inside an “anti-woke” bubble[...] Anyone outside the woke bubble is considered anti-woke. If you're not part of them you're the enemy. I find it really refreshing to see them whine about reinstating accounts of "the enemy" which is as I said basically anyone of differing opinion. It's also fun that people on here throwing a tantrum about this. So sweet. PS.: Delicious was the word I was looking for. The only tool they have here is downvoting, which is like confirmation in this case. Delicious!
• r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  Not a villain? Well he's utterly screwed his employees and broken employment law in multiple countries by not giving proper notice or consulting on redundancies, but hey who gives a shit about workers rights? Not you obviously.
  • systemvoltage 4y ago
    I am fine with this actually. It is not Amazon warehouse workers we are talking about. These people were highly paid and Twitter seems to run just fine without them. FAANG can probably get rid of 70% of the bloat. Elon did give them 3 months severence which is quite amazing.
    • ssnistfajen 4y ago
      Elon is literally trying to deny the severance packages he promised to give. How is this amazing? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/musk-brings-spacex-lawyers-to-twitter-as-layoff-lawsuits-mount-report-says/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/musk-brings-spac...
      • systemvoltage 4y ago
        If this is true that that's inexclusable and shitty. Still legal(?), but not ethical. Looks like the they're being challenged in the court. Whether firing was done ethically or not, I still think that Twitter was bloated af and needed trimming. The macroeconomic conditions led to a huge hiring spree for last 8 years of 0% interest rates. We fucked around in the silicon valley and we are about to find out. Overall, on a national/GDP scale, we can use these employees for betterment of other things than wasting their time at FAANG/Twitter. I'd like to see 1000 lean and mean companies than 10 bloated FAANGs.
        • ssnistfajen 4y ago
          That's just, like, your opinion. What matters here is employees were fired on extremely arbitrary grounds, then had their labour rights infringed upon.
• pfoof 4y ago
  Good job OP. You managed to ressurect pg since 2 years ago
• roland35 4y ago
  I'm sorry but saying "he is a smart guy" is a bit ridiculous at this point. A "smart guy" certainly may not know everything about running a social network, but he _would_ listen to the advice from those around them. Being smart also means understanding what you don't know and not surround yourself with sycophants.
  • rbanffy 4y ago
    > but he _would_ listen to the advice from those around them. At this point, I'm assuming he is surrounded by people too eager to please him. > Being smart also means understanding what you don't know and not surround yourself with sycophants. The inescapable conclusion is that Elon is not as smart as he thinks. Whether he can learn is open to debate and will become evident shortly.
    • roland35 4y ago
      I have no inside info of Twitter besides being an interested bystander, but it seems like he's flat out ignored advice (and later fired the advice givers) at multiple points since taking over. I'm sure anyone left is only still around by being a yesman.
    • mcv 4y ago
      > At this point, I'm assuming he is surrounded by people too eager to please him. He definitely is. Or at least people pretending to. I think this is one of the biggest risks of being too successful, too rich: it becomes too easy to surround yourself with people who will only agree with everything you say, and you end up believing in yourself too much, any criticism is jealousy, any contradiction is sabotage, and obviously you must really be so smart you can do anything, because look at all the people telling you so. (Unrelated, but I think that's also what hurt the Star Wars prequels; Lucas was the legend. He either didn't get or didn't accept the constructive criticism that made the originals great.)
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    Smart and wise are related but somewhat orthogonal, Elon is quite smart but not very wise.
• xqcgrek2 4y ago
  Why shouldn't you have to pay a few bucks to advertise your other social media sites? Surely you're wealthy enough.
• IAmGraydon 4y ago
  I’m curious to hear your thoughts on him banning Ukrainian phone numbers, effectively making it so that Ukrainians can’t sign up to share information about the war.
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    I would chalk that up to slow service degradation more than malice. Twitter is likely slowly running aground.
    • DonHopkins 4y ago
      Ever Given meets Costa Concordia. You with all the transportation disaster metaphors today! It is not appropriate or ethical for ship captains to use euphemisms or other language that may downplay or minimize the severity of a ship running aground or any other maritime incident or accident. Ship captains have a serious responsibility to communicate clearly and accurately about the status of their vessel and to take all necessary actions to ensure the safety of their crew and passengers. Using euphemisms or other language that may mislead or confuse people about the true nature of an incident or accident could potentially compromise safety and hinder effective communication and response. Love, DangGPT.
  • fundad 4y ago
    He chose his side in that war and it’s totally legal to use a private company to aid genocide.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• fzeroracer 4y ago
  I don't understand how he can salvage this situation. You cannot simply go 'lol jk' with policy changes like this and reverse them because once you've lost user trust it cannot be easily regained. Individuals may not remember, but groups as a whole can have a long lasting memory and once the various subgroups like art twitter, influencer twitter etc leave they aren't coming back without serious enticement which Twitter can barely afford as they're burning money.
• highwaylights 4y ago
  I can get on board with all of the above in principle, but I think you've made a strong case for suggesting it's in a tailspin. It's theoretically salvageable, but I don't see a version of a salvaged Twitter that is compatible with his worldview. He is a colourful, loud, opinionated public figure. That's great for his personal Twitter and his follower count, but it's terrible if you're trying to convince the world that you're a suitable custodian of a free public square. Mark Zuckerberg is beige as often as he's able to be on just about everything. Tim Cook speaks on issues of privacy when it's relevant and otherwise says as little as possible. Reddit is as un-opinionated on content as they can possibly be. Having any divisive opinion by definition divides your support base. Usually in half. I can only assume Musk-brand libertarian free-for-all social media is a niche product (potentially a large niche, but a niche nonetheless) that's very probably worth some amount significantly less than $40 billion.
• adverbly 4y ago
  > Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media. You have someone with Asperger's who is self aware enough to go on SNL and laugh about it, but for some reason also wants to spend 40B on owning and running a social platform, thinking they can "improve" by working on it part time despite having zero actual experience in the field. The ego is unbelievable. > He could still salvage the situation I hope so, but these billionaire ego megaprojects just don't seem to be die. Neom, Metaverse, dystopia-twitter...
• calculatte 4y ago
• EGreg 4y ago
  pg, yes Elon's $8 a month and now this has generated terrible optics. But like Donald Trump with politicians, isn't he just saying the quiet part out loud that most capitalists actually do? I think it is valuable to examine why we were against Donald Trump doing, but somehow in the broader picture everyone was doing it (e.g. Bill Clinton cracking down on "illegal immigrants", building border fences etc.) The important thing is the broader industry, not one player. You want to see alternatives? Here is an alternative we've been building since 2011, it's a labor of love in which we invested over $1 million and 10 years. It is far, far more extensive than Mastodon and you can see below why that matters. Would you check it out? It's free and open source: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform https://github.com/Qbix/Platform Not only have we built it, but we've interviewed a ton of people around the broader topics of capitalism and free speech. There is the idea that capitalism is the best system for promoting free speech, but that is not, in fact, the case. Just as one example of many, Sinclair Television told their anchors word-for-word what to say, and anyone who doesn't do what the employer says is fired and replaced by a different mouthpiece. Intellectual property, and other forms of ownership, are by their very definition designed to exclude people from using certain content / property in certain ways. In fact, conservatives who bristled at Obama's "you didn't build it" used to say "I built it, I own it!" In that case, they should celebrate the way that Twitter and Facebook were privately managed. But many of them instead were calling for regulations to prevent them from doing just that. So which is it? I had an interview with Noam Chomsky twice about that, here is the latest: https://qbix.com/chomsky https://qbix.com/chomsky If you allow me to bring up a taboo for a bit, I think it's important to bring it up on Hacker News. VCs as an industry, and YCombinator as part of that, specifically try to fund platforms that end up being managed by only a few people and extract rents. Most of them avoid funding open source platforms, which end up crowdfunding from the People (thanks to the JOBS act, for instance). Or from the Knight Foundation. Or Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress funding Matrix.org VCs specifically tell you that they want you to "focus" on one feature, to "capture" enough of the market, and some of them (e.g. Peter Thiel) unabashedly proclaimed that "competition is for losers", build a monopoly. Zuck used to be a guy who turned down a $1M acquisition offer from Microsoft, and open sourced his code. He wanted to build Wirehog as a decentralized platform for the people (https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/) Peter Thiel and Sean Parker "put a bullet in that thing" (their words) and groomed him to build a monopoly and extract rents. Zuck and Elon privately control the major PUBLIC forums we all use. And are we all better for it? I think the work of Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, Vitalik and others has benefitted the world far more and enabled trillions in new ideas (including Google, Facebook, Amazon) precisely because it was based around open source and protocols, and didn't prevent people and organizations from using it the way they wanted! Google, Amazon etc. could have never started as "keyword: Google" on AOL, for instance. Think about it. Over the last decade I have been steadily drawn into the open source camp. My team and I started an open source alternative to Big Tech 10 years ago. We've applied to YC probably around 8 different times, as we kept growing and reaching 10 million users. We never even got to the interview. Such general-purpose ideas are just not something interesting to most VCs. It took MySQL, NGiNX, and other platforms 7-10 years before they got funded in a capitalist manner. By then, they'd taken over the world. I'm sure there are exceptions, and YCombinator has recently started to fund open protocols and nonprofits - I'm glad to see it. For reference, our pitch to VCs for years had been along these lines: https://qbix.com/deck.pdf https://qbix.com/deck.pdf https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ PS: For those who downvote, please write a response. After all, I've spent a decade and $1M of my own money putting together an alternative pg is looking for, seeing the need for it way before others. I give it away for free. All I ask is that you take a minute to write your own words in the conversation about why you disagree :) PPS: I think the rule that you can downvote on HN to signal mere disagreement (as opposed to logical issues, dishonesty, etc.) is flawed. This is also a free speech issue ... on this site, if we want to be intellectually honest, we should at least downvote and then comment.
• JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
  > > He's eccentric, definitely Eccentric people buy stuff and are too busy enjoying them . This guy searches for mentions of himself to silence critics while sitting on 200bn dollars. When that wasn’t enough to silence everybody he went on to buy the platform. If that is the end of the road then it’s better to get lost on the way like the Dan Bilzerians , and the other truly eccentric guys
• space_fountain 4y ago
  I think villains don't exist in the real world. There are no Voldemort with no discernible reason for doing bad things, but Elon has been doing a lot of bad things lately and is inching into the realm that seems worth calling a villain to me
  • InsOp 4y ago
    can you elaborate on what bad or evil things he is doing?
    • space_fountain 4y ago
      Calling and implying random people pedophiles including a former executive, mass unbanning people, firing thousands based on very little, and pushing the rest to go "hardcore", releasing internal documents to conservative outlets so they can go on and tar everyone, and honestly just running his company into the ground which is bad because people rely on him to keep twitter as a going concern
  • MisterMower 4y ago
    How can Elon be a villain if you don’t think villains exist in the real world? Your comment doesn’t make sense.
    • space_fountain 4y ago
      I'm speaking in two senses of the word villain. It's clear that for basically everyone if you dig deep enough you can understand why they do things, it's also true that some people do bad things and cause harm and it's not the craziest thing to call those people villains
      • MisterMower 4y ago
        Some people act like villains and it’s okay to call them villains but if you dig deep enough to understand their motives they’re usually just misunderstood and actually not villains at all. Makes sense to me. Thank you for explaining!
• noelsusman 4y ago
  Calling somebody like Elon eccentric is political correctness for rich, powerful people. It's a polite way of calling him a crazy asshole.
  • hermitcrab 4y ago
    Rich and deranged = eccentric Poor and deranged = mad
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    eccentric (adj) 1. Socially maladjusted + wealth. <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/107453472642613292 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/107453472642613292>
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tootie 4y ago
  Elon is smart but irrational. This goes for a lot of people who are highly accomplished and yet have bizarre opinions and behavior
• quantified 4y ago
  Twitter is incidentally a tech company. Fundamentally, it's a "people communicating with each other in people-configurable groups" and that is quite unlike building vehicles.
• keepper 4y ago
  So your initial comments have aged poorly… From your own feed: “ People are rooting for him to fail because he's a rich white guy and a political moderate. “ https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1593206076983635968?s=46&t=DgbA8vFWvgUMtJcu2RXZ5A https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1593206076983635968?s=46&t=... I really really really dislike this whole trend to feel “victimized” while being some of the most successful people in earth. People are “turning” on Elon after being hugely beloved, purely cause he’s doing idiotic things. Plain an simple. Furthermore, we should hold someone who’s the richest person on earth to higher standards.
  • bambax 4y ago
    "a political moderate"?? PG said this a month ago? (Nov. 17th) Wow. That tells us much more about PG's politics than I would ever have wanted to know. Also, "rich white guy" adds a nice vibe of "all lives matter". It's a truth universally acknowledged that white people are victims. Esp. if they're male. And rich.
    • mcv 4y ago
      There are plenty of rich white guys I'm not actively rooting to fail. In fact, until quite recently, I really believed Musk was doing good, was as smart as he presented himself, and was a decent human being. Quirky maybe, but I love quirky. He has since exposed himself as a massive asshole and idiot.
• sulam 4y ago
  So I agree that he did smart things in the past. However he is totally incompetent managing Twitter in a rational business way. For a while there I thought he might be trying to get the debt reduced substantially and was preserving cash in the meantime. The last few weeks and the constant own-goal-via-shitposting that he does are solid evidence that any strategic plot has been well and truly lost. I get the sense that he wants to “own the libs” to build credibility with US “conservatives” — despite the fact that the libs regularly own themselves more thoroughly than he can — but he’s mostly just scoring goals against his own pocket book right now. The people I feel sorry for are TSLA investors. Edit: oh and the rank and file Twitter employees who are either having to put up with his BS or haven’t been paid the severance they were promised. He seems to be taking a “sue me” approach to that, which is really really shitty for a typical employee who uses their income to pay rent/mortgages and buy groceries. I hope he loses another billion in back payments and penalties on that shit, because he’s setting awful examples right now.
  • fundad 4y ago
    I think we can stop thinking he’s running Twitter for revenue. This is clearly politically motivated and he’s even quite open it.
• skywhopper 4y ago
  He has nothing to do with the quality of the cars or rockets. He’s done none of the “work” there. He gets attention with overpromises and straight up lies.
• michaelmrose 4y ago
  Nobody has ever pay nor will ever pay Elon to work on cars or rockets. He is solely responsible for working on people a job which by all accounts he does very poorly. With twitter his poor performance is merely on display for the whole world in tweets. It is yet another poor decision in an entire life full of poor decisions ranging from paying a cut rate private investigator to investigate a hero spearheading the effort to save children and then publicly and falsely proclaiming that person a pedophile, then lying about pedophile just being used as a generic insult, allegedly trying to bribe an employee to have sex with him for a pony by her account, an entire series of failed relationships, abandoning his wife after their kid died by her account of the matter, spreading conspiracy theories that the psycho that attacked pelosi was a prostitute rather than a deranged conspiracy theorist. He doesn't do anything but buy the services of people smarter and better than himself and take credit for their success while continually making poor choices and offering an example of terrible leadership. You act as if his failure with twitter is forgivable because its a different sort of business from his other ventures but its really not. Nobody expects Elon to design a rocket either he's supposed to be an expert in leading people and he's stunningly poor at it. There is little chance of turning twitter around with Elon at the helm. It was barely been profitable in its whole history and now its becoming a pariah to both the potential employees who could serve in that role and the advertisers who pay all of the bills. It's going to steadily lose money until Elon steps away and makes a firm commitment not to ratfuck it any longer and puts someone in charge that both sides trust. Then MAYBE it can stop hemorrhaging money. It will remain a black eye both personally to him and his business acumen. Twitter introduced the world to the real Elon and its not a person worth knowing. If you have positive feelings towards him I would suggest its because as a fellow rich person you have more in common with him than with us even if you are a better man. I would suggest not lowering your own stock by defending those so obviously inferior to yourself.
• xupybd 4y ago
  I'm impressed that one of your tweets could generate almost 600 comments in 1 hour. This should be an interesting stress test of HN. Often when something generates this level of interaction performance suffers.
• _cenw 4y ago
  SpaceX has talented people working there despite Elon, not because of him. They supposedly have an entire handbook on "managing Elon" for deflecting his weird requests and framing things in a way that doesn't provoke his ire. They put up with it because they only have so many opportunities to work on space. Twitter has people dependent on their H-1B and very few true believers that are unfit to serve in their role. Ella Irwin has apparently personally ghost banned ("Hide Reply" but with lying to the user about being hidden) any mention of libsoftiktok - a stochastic terror organization just itching for a lynching of queer people - made anywhere close to TwitterSafety recently.
  • mcv 4y ago
    > They supposedly have an entire handbook on "managing Elon" for deflecting his weird requests and framing things in a way that doesn't provoke his ire. I heard that too. Is it just a rumour or do we know this is true? And if it's true at SpaceX, is it also true at Tesla?
    • layer8 4y ago
      Regarding your first question, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042340 I see no reason why Tesla would be any different.
      • MacsHeadroom 4y ago
        That reads like fiction to me. Someone pseudonymously posting on Tumblr about being an early SpaceX intern is not in anyway a reliable source. The story sounds 100% made up. At any rate, "managing up" is a normal thing for people in the management hierarchy everywhere.
      • philosopher1234 4y ago
        Tesla is absolutely the same.
  • rizoma_dev 4y ago
    It really is criminal how much preferential treatment lott is getting both now and under the previous administration. This alone should be grounds for an investigation into the site
• samtp 4y ago
  Well he did very publicly call the cave diver who saved 12 children a pedophile because he was jealous of him. He also called for a leading infectious disease expert to be jailed, further endangering someone who was already under armed protection from previous threats. And there was that one time that he shared an unfounded conspiracy theory about an elderly man who was attacked with a hammer in his own home. There was also the time when he tried to trade a horse for a handjob from one of his employees. That's all pretty clearly in villain territory.
  • occamsrazorwit 4y ago
    He also tried to anonymously get news agencies to publish that the cave diver was a pedophile too [1]. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-cave-rescuer-accusations-buzzfeed-email https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-...
  • kmlx 4y ago
    > Well he did very publicly call the cave diver who saved 12 children a pedophile because he was jealous of him. this is false. he called him that after the cave diver told Musk to “stick his submarine where it hurts”. it only takes 1 minute to search google.
    • kmlx 4y ago
      https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk-british-diver-thai-cave-rescue-pedo-twitter https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk... > Musk visited the cave system himself. Unsworth said the billionaire “was asked to leave very quickly”. He also told CNN Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts”.
      • giardini 4y ago
        Thanks for posting a link to the back-and-forth between Musk and Unsworth (the British cave explorer), which was pretty damned funny. They obviously didn't get along, to say the least!
• SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
  Twitter just has to be predictable, that's it. That's all anyone wants, IMO, when you boil the controversies down to its essence. People will always complain, but the brands, the journalists, the users, they all just want something they can understand. That might come in time. Surely it can't continue to be this chaotic forever, right? At least then we'll know what this site's future is.
• peter_retief 4y ago
  I think all social media have terms and conditions similar to this, it just seemed a bit dramatic the way they laid it out. I enjoy your tweets and would miss you if you left.
• TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  > I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media. That’s what I find so peculiar. I thought he made so much progress on cars and rockets by trusting experts to help him. But with Twitter there have been lots of experts who keep trying to tell him he’s seriously misunderstanding how social media works, and he will just give them a snarky tweet reply and act like he knows better. Maybe it’s the fact that on twitter everyone can see the discussion and he’s got to project this persona with bravado that he probably doesn’t do in a private meeting. Maybe he will turn it around but for a lot of us he’s destroyed our hang out spot and we’ve embraced alternatives. Mastodon isn’t perfect but it feels really great to see a problem, open a GitHub issue, and get a genuine discussion of how to implement it. And no one is going to come crashing in and tear it all down.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• robomartin 4y ago
  • malermeister 4y ago
    > I can't identify a single person in history who has dared to risk so much, personally and financially, in support of freedom in many forms. The guy literally banned a bunch of people for making fun of him shortly after he took over, then proceeded to ban journalists for... doing journalism. Now he's censoring any mention of competitors in an obviously anti-competitive move What are you talking about?
  • dd36 4y ago
    What are you even referring to?
• Imnimo 4y ago
  >Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media. >It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX. If the techniques for cars and rockets don't work in social media, why were people wrong to write him off despite his Tesla and SpaceX experience?
• asim 4y ago
  Unfortunately for those who idolised Elon, their world view is beginning to crumble. His actions are not justifiable. The way he treats people, the way he rules his companies, the way he governs his new "free speech" platform. The man is a tyrant. He's idolised for the things he's achieved but if he had not achieved them would he be given the same benefit of the doubt? Hypocrisy. The way people treat this man versus others who act the same, it's two faced. The who's who of silicon valley were championing him right up until a few hours ago. Everything that he says or does that is deplorable, people eat up. But I guess if he's "changing the world" he should get to be a dick right?
  • smrtinsert 4y ago
    Techies are very susceptible to the cult of personality. How many times do we have to watch that play out?
    • ramraj07 4y ago
      As opposed to which group of people who are more immune to it?
      • lanstin 4y ago
        We are the ones extracting all the surplus money from society, so it is more important for us to stay good than for a random person to stay good.
        • fragmede 4y ago
          Techies get paid well, but in the conflict between capital and labor, we're not capital. Not most of us anyway, not by a large margin. Occasionally a blessed few might win the IPO lottery and become rich enough to get out of the rat race, but exceedingly few become rich enough on top of that to "extract surplus money from society".
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• CodeWriter23 4y ago
  Just going to leave this here for you @pg https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288?s=61&t=jRjCvEkIdYL8Gz037Kqb1Q https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604593057676300288?s=61...
• Marazan 4y ago
  Remember when Elon baselessly called someone a peadophile. Repeatedly. So eccentric.
• rdxm 4y ago
• mschuster91 4y ago
  > He's eccentric, definitely, but that should be news to no one. Being "eccentric" usually means non-mainstream clothing, music taste, a big ass selection of historic cars or similar things. Musk? Dude literally interacts with or unbans high-profile neo-Nazis and antisemites. That's not "eccentric" by any definition, that's enabling the vilest of the vile. No, banning Kanye again doesn't excuse all the other Nazi accounts.
  • brazzledazzle 4y ago
    > unbans high-profile neo-Nazis and antisemites I think this is often ignored given the daily deluge of chaos but this move was only ever arguably valid in the context of being a free speech absolutist. It's clear at this point that free speech absolutism is not at all what he's interested in.
• mcv 4y ago
  > His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. I used to think that too, but I've since come across a story that SpaceX actually has people who's informal job is to manage him, and they present their ideas in such a way that he thinks they're his, in order to keep him happy. He's mostly there to bring money and hype. No idea if that story is true, but honestly, it would explain some things. The impression he's been giving me recently is that his success may have broken him. Too many people worshipping him and praising literally every crazy thing he does, may have made him believe he can do literally everything including run a social media company on his own without first learning how social media companies work. He honestly seems to be running Twitter into the ground. The mass firings he started with, followed by ruining the blue checkmark feature, really didn't make it look like he knows what he's doing. His management style sounds like hell.
  • randomcarbloke 4y ago
    He's good at finding the right people and putting them in a room, and convincing other people to give him money...that's it.
  • ramraj07 4y ago
    I did my PhD under possibly the most narcissistic, ruthless, and petty professors anyone around me had ever heard of, so I might be able to comment on this. I and the few people who managed to actually graduate with our sanity intact (out of like 50) learned to play this game you suggested where we have to play to their egos, and try and salvage their shitty, shitty ideas into workable projects that will end with us publishing. Every week they will suggest experiments that are nonsensical, and we will huddle and discuss how to do some preliminary work and present it in a way such that they will think it’s their idea to change it in a more productive direction. When smart people are forced to work with egotistical pricks like this, I think it’s inevitable such a system comes in place. The interesting thing is my professor kinda knew we do this, he just acknowledged it as part of the dance of their system. For Better or worse this shitty lab actually put out a drug that helps patients (I constantly think about how and why that happened). Could this lab have been more productive? Absolutely. Would this lab have existed without these people though? Probably not though. The question here is whether Elon is aware this is why spacex and Tesla succeeded or he’s too deranged now to remember it. Looks like it’s the latter and that just sucks. My professors too have gotten unhinged (they’ve been literally pushed out of two universities and an entire country, though they always find another sucker, which at this point is the wellcome institute lol). When you’ve been doing this shitty shtick for too long I suppose it gets to you.
• smrtinsert 4y ago
  I'm deleting my account in the hope it will keep that data safe. I have 0 confidence in his ability to run a massive application safely and securely. What a shit show, as if he needed to add the managerial drama on top of getting rid of 75% of his staff. I would say delete your account while you still can. Who knows what he will do your data.
• chrchang523 4y ago
  I've deactivated the account that I created last month. I agree that he may still salvage the situation, and I hope to reactivate or create a new account if/when that happens. For now, though, the best thing I can do is reinforce the signal that this was a major misstep, for a reason he should be well aware of: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176
• morelisp 4y ago
  In your tweet you said "I give up." Given that you're not giving up your Twitter account, nor something less tangible like your belief Elon is acting in good faith, nor even something the evidence keeps building against like his ability to run Twitter well - what exactly are you giving up, or giving up on?
• Alex3917 4y ago
  > He could still salvage the situation. That would involve him spending the time to learn how social media works. No doubt he's smart enough, but it seems like he may no longer have the attention span required to learn this.
• raspberry1337 4y ago
  I give as much credence to these thoughts as I do to all the Hacker News users predicting the imminent software-crash of twitter one month ago when Elon fired 80% of the employees. My reflection is that HN just seems smarter than reddit and other places, but it's just an illusion.
• echelon 4y ago
  I think a lot of us would love to see you post more on HN! Twitter may be bigger and more discoverable, but the discussion pales in comparison to what happens here. This is a much more special place.
• mmmmpancakes 4y ago
  > I still think Elon is a smart guy. > I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media. Hmmm...
• rising-sky 4y ago
  Well account is now suspended so I guess you were "made to leave"
  • ssnistfajen 4y ago
    Elon is so incredibly thin-skinned that he's burning bridges with anyone who dares to not agree with him even once. First Bari Weiss, now Paul Graham. Paul clearly stated here & on Mastodon that he still believes in Elon Musk. This is classic self-sabotage of a deranged dictator.
    • LegitShady 4y ago
      What do you think the odds are that elon did it or even knew about it?
      • ccn0p 4y ago
        wondering the same thing....
      • ssnistfajen 4y ago
        My own personal sense tells me no employee/subordinate would carry out such abrupt and drastic actions without explicit approval from above, no matter how much they want to please their boss. I could be wrong though. Unfollowing Bari Weiss and suspending Paul Graham over very minor disagreements they voiced seems like a very personal & impulsive decision that I don't see why anyone besides Elon himself decided on it.
        • LegitShady 4y ago
          > My own personal sense tells me no employee/subordinate would carry out such abrupt and drastic actions without explicit approval from above, no matter how much they want to please their boss. I could be wrong though. outside of a very small bubble no one knows who PG is and I promise you his twitter status account doesn't matter if it was breaking the rules. Go ask your mother if she knows who elon musk, bill gates, steve jobs, and paul graham are/were. No one outside of computer science/business people looking for VC know who he is.
• sandofsky 4y ago
  Two years ago you published an essay that seemed to argue that criticism against Elon Musk was simply from “Haters,” jealous of his success. http://paulgraham.com/fh.html http://paulgraham.com/fh.html In light of recent events, have you considered updating the essay?
  • concordDance 4y ago
    That's definitely not what he argues there. It's quite possible for 95% of hate to be mostly unfounded while that person is still worthy of hate. It's just that the existence of haters does not necessarily mean that person is hate-worthy. The different rates and ways that various types of information travels through media (both social and not) and gets distorted by it are fascinating and there's probably been some good books written on them...
    • sandofsky 4y ago
      If my memory serves, Graham would sometimes link to his essay when people criticized Musk. It’s hard for me to check at the moment, as Graham’s Twitter account has been suspended.
      • concordDance 4y ago
        As I said, 95% of criticism might by illegitimate while the 5% isn't. Paul could have been linking for the X% of Musk hate that's ill founded based on his personal knowledge of the guy.
        • sandofsky 4y ago
          In the article, he makes no breakdown like you describe. He appears to have created a straw man which he alludes to whenever once of his associates receive criticism. In light of Musk fulfilling the predictions of his worst “haters,” maybe this merits clarifying the essay.
          • 4y ago
• taurath 4y ago
  His intelligence and maximum capability aside, it is his inconsistency and sociopathic levels of impulsivity that are what is causing his bank to drain right now. I’m surprised I have any surprise left that pg has so much tolerance for complete disregard for principles or users. All my friends, the hackers makers annd those who are on the forefront are leaving Twitter.
• sanderjd 4y ago
  "Villain" isn't the word I'd use, but he has been increasingly indulging in gleeful cruelty and childish nonsense, both of which are very off putting. I also admire his car and rocket businesses, but he seems to have gotten sucked deeply into the very online culture war grievance trap in the past few years, to the point that it now seems to be taking up essentially all of his time now. It's really a shame to see.
  • fallingknife 4y ago
    Gleeful cruelty? Really? That's quite an overstatement for a bit of social media drama.
    • onryowave 4y ago
      he replied to paulg's tweet about leaving the website with laughing emojis after banning him he's only doing it to be an asshole at this point
      • AgentME 4y ago
        Sure you didn't see a fake screenshot meme? I haven't been able to find anyone else talking about that, I couldn't find that on Elon's twitter replies page, and Elon just tweeted that he's reversing the ban (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616426114932737 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616426114932737) which I'm not sure tracks with him posting exactly like that. (Not trying to defend him at all, just trying to keep a handle on what exactly it is he's doing.)
    • mola 4y ago
      Real ppl get credible death threats in real life because of his tweets is gleeful cruelty ...
    • sanderjd 4y ago
      "Gleeful cruelty" is how his bullying tweets come off to me, yeah. He does the thing where he plays it off like he's just joking, just like every other bully out there, but he's being cruel, and enjoying it.
• Marazan 4y ago
  Account suspended. Guess you are.
• boudin 4y ago
  If the same techniques would have been applied to Tesla and SpaceX the result would be different. I guess there must be quite a few people much smarter than Musk behind the success of those companies. Calling abusive and intolerant behaviour "eccentric" is really weak.
• magicloop 4y ago
  I think pg is one of the best placed people to critique the situation because he knows what a start-up is and how to do one, he's in the same tier of society (top tier wealth), and he knows what is takes to run a social network. The "it is going to be hardcore from here" email the CEO sent to Tesla employees 'worked', but the same email to Twitter employees resulted in significant resignations. I think the CEO was shocked and this underlies pg's point. Given that it was a forced buy, the game was always that of a corporate raider approach - go in, make the unpleasant but needed decisions, and then sell out as soon as the value uptick became realisable. pg applauded the cut to staff IIRC. CEO should have taken a leaf out of Rupert Murdoch's book - as the owner don't write the headlines - let the editor do that. Being behind the scenes to just make the most considered accurate business decisions was the right way. If instead you are out in front of the public, you're emotional side will kick in due to the slings-and-arrows coming from the audience. Hence the wrong decisions will be made. You can't wear both the hats of 'eccentric' Corporate Jester and Corporate Raider at the same time. The Dave Chapelle boo-ing incident just underlies this.
• moultano 4y ago
  You were just suspended though, so at least in the short term it's out of your hands.
• rizoma_dev 4y ago
  It appears you won't be returning to twitter
• irthomasthomas 4y ago
  I was just about to share your tweet, and... account suspended. Things sure do escalate quickly, these days!
• tim333 4y ago
  He's now at https://mas.to/@paulg https://mas.to/@paulg by the way. Twitter account suspended.
• pardon_me 4y ago
  The best choice. Twitter was Twitter before Elon Musk and it could be Twitter again after Elon Tusk - although it is likely to tank unless he has the balls to move on before say 2024. I wonder what's next...
  • mcv 4y ago
    If Twitter is going down, I think it's going down well before 2024 rolls around. Also, I don't think Twitter is ever going to be the same. It trades heavily on its reputation, and reputation damage isn't so easily undone. People who left and found something else, won't be coming back.
• marvin 4y ago
  I've kept a pretty distanced opinion about Musk's Twitter dramas, figuring that the network effect and having access to the thoughts of whichever thinkers I enjoy reading is what matters. Most other stuff is ancillary to that, and challenging the ad-based funding model of media is a very interesting experiment. But now that he's started banning the A list of intellectually interesting people, I don't see how it can end well. This decision needs to be reversed very soon, or the network effect will be destroyed. Your tweets are the reason I bothered to register an account in the first place, so hoping that Musk figures this out sooner than the hopefully short time that's needed for most to accrete somewhere else.
• TwiceCubed 4y ago
• olzn 4y ago
  Check out Lens Protocol if you’re looking for a viable decentralised alternative, Paul.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• emsy 4y ago
  You a G!
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nacs 4y ago
  > I'm not leaving Twitter. This aged poorly.. just 2 hours later and Paul has now been suspended on Twitter.
• whoisthisguy 4y ago
  Yes. Just happened. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604616863673208832
• pySSK 4y ago
  > Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media. How do you reconcile this with > I still think Elon is a smart guy
• adl 4y ago
  I do not agree with your opinion on Elon Musk, but I admire how calm, rational and polite your response to this situation is. Most people (including me) would let our emotions take over. You, sir, are a class act.
• myko 4y ago
  > I still think Elon is a smart guy Against all available evidence
• LastTrain 4y ago
  He can be good at rockets and cars and still be a villain. Being eccentric on its own doesn’t involve victimizing innocents, which he does on the regular…
• pupppet 4y ago
  He’s not eccentric, he’s a troll. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604329282796457984?s=46&t=sWcy0UG750Lm6E80-4QYMQ https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604329282796457984?s=46...
• bane 4y ago
  As Musk slowly (or rapidly depending on your point of view) turns Twitter into an expensive version of Truth Social and Parler, being "seen" there threatens to associate users with his overriding POV -- it's going to start sending a message just for being there. Running a forum that's even handed is pretty hard and requires a different kind of idealism.
• pellucide 4y ago
  With all due respect for you, I hereby am writing elon musk off. elon and trump have same mental make up.
• MylesDelfin 4y ago
  The man making the decisions in Twitter may be smart but that's irrelevant because of the fact that he's irresponsible. Others might find it outlandish but social media is a tool for tyrants in some parts of the world such as where I'm living. By tyrant, I don't mean someone who merely violates the right to free speech. Thousands have lost their lives because of the irresponsible implementation of ideas in places where loss of revenue is the only consequence for mistakes.
• andyshi 4y ago
  "the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media." hmm... Elon Musk was a software engineer in the beginning, you know?
• ush 4y ago
  I hope he does salvage the situation and find someone else to run Twitter and saves himself from being eaten alive. The world needs him.
  • fundad 4y ago
    Running Twitter seems to be more important than money or anything else the world expects from him.
• hatenberg 4y ago
  I got a bridge to sell to you too. He’s 1:1 replaying the Trump playbook and there will be no salvaging, only escalation.
• d3vmax 4y ago
  Paul, on Nov. 16 you mentioned on twitter, "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX." Source: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961 In hindsight do you now think that Musk is not suitable anymore? He is too thin-skinned to be running a public forum and not being able to anticipate consequences that his new rules/actions have on the brand value of twitter and musk. He and Peter Theil are extremely anti-democratic as it all comes down to money and power trips. What are your thoughts?
• kybernetikos 4y ago
  Would you mind posting your mastodon link here? Twitter have replaced the 'my site' link in your tweet.