Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Consistently wrong since 2002

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / ‘ They’re Not That Smart’: Musk & His Cronies Open Thread

‘ They’re Not That Smart’: Musk & His Cronies Open Thread

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There’s an old proverb, Irish or possibly Yiddish, about fortuitous wealth: He was standing outside with a bucket when it started raining soup. Musk, hopefully, is making a joke about his roadrunning tech toy. Not all of his fellow would-be Masters of the Universe, much less his fan base, seem to understand that Musk neither invented the bucket nor caused the Fortean precipitation.

Yesterday, the world got a look inside Elon Musk’s phone. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is currently in litigation with Twitter and trying to back out of his deal to buy the platform and take it private. As part of the discovery process related to this lawsuit, Delaware’s Court of Chancery released hundreds of text messages and emails sent to and from Musk. The 151-page redacted document is a remarkable, voyeuristic record of a few months in the life of the world’s richest (and most overexposed) man and a rare unvarnished glimpse into the overlapping worlds of Silicon Valley, media, and politics. The texts are juicy, but not because they are lurid, particularly offensive, or offer up some scandalous Muskian master plan—quite the opposite. What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone…

Appearing in the document is, I suppose, a perverse kind of status symbol (some people I spoke with in tech and media circles copped to searching through it for their own names). And what is immediately apparent upon reading the messages is that many of the same people the media couldn’t stop talking about this year were also the ones inserting themselves into Musk’s texts. There’s Joe Rogan; William MacAskill, the effective altruist, getting in touch on behalf of the crypto billionaire and Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried; Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (and the subject of a recent, unflattering profile); Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, NIMBY, and prolific blocker on Twitter; Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who was recently revealed to have joined a November 2020 call about contesting Donald Trump’s election loss; and, of course, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO. Musk, arguably the most covered and exhausting of them all, has an inbox that doubles as a power ranking of semi- to fully polarizing people who have been in the news the past year.

Few of the men in Musk’s phone consider themselves his equal. Many of the messages come off as fawning, although they’re possibly more opportunistic than earnest. Whatever the case, the intentions are unmistakable: Musk is perceived to have power, and these pillars of the tech industry want to be close to it. “I love your ‘Twitter algorithms should be open source’ tweet,” Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, said, before suggesting that he was going to mention the idea to members of Congress at an upcoming GOP policy retreat. Antonio Gracias, the CEO of Valor Partners, cheered on the same tweet, telling the billionaire, “I am 100% with you Elon. To the mattresses no matter what.”…

During Musk’s April media frenzy, the billionaire frequently demonstrated a shallow understanding of Twitter, suggesting contradictory policies such as banning spam and bot armies but also leaving up all content that is “legal.” (Spam, bot armies, and crypto scam hawkers are all technically legal.) Many of the ideas coming from his peanut gallery were equally poor. Döpfner, who is in charge of numerous media companies, including Insider and Politico, offered to run Twitter for Musk but seemed woefully unprepared for the task. In a novel-length text, Döpfner laid out his “#Gameplan” for the company, which started with the line item: “1.),, Solve Free Speech.” He alluded to vague ideas such as making Twitter censorship resistant via a “decentralized infrastructure” and “open APIs.” He’s similarly nonspecific with his suggestion that Twitter have a “marketplace” of algorithms. “If you’re a snowflake and don’t want content that offends you pick another algorithm,” he wrote Musk.

At one point in early April, Musk appears infatuated with his own idea to replace Twitter with a blockchain-based payment-and-message system. In a string of texts to his brother, the entrepreneur Kimbal Musk, he manages to convince himself that the idea could be huge and a way to crush spam while preserving free speech. In this preposterous scenario, users would have to pay a fractional amount of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin to post or retweet. Roughly 10 days later, Musk sends a different text noting that “blockchain Twitter isn’t possible.”…

What’s immediately clear is that many of the men in Musk’s phone are having fun with his Twitter escapade. It is an opportunity to blithely throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. They toss out phrases like “hard reboot” and “Day Zero. Sharpen your blades boys”—to cleave through what they see as an unnecessary and ineffective workforce, perhaps. They imagine massive revenue opportunities and sweeping changes that only they can usher in. For this crew, the early success of their past companies or careers is usually prologue, and their skills will, of course, transfer to any area they choose to conquer (including magically solving free speech). But what they are actually doing is winging it…

There is a tendency, especially when it comes to the über-rich and powerful, to assume and to fantasize about what we can’t see. We ascribe shadowy brilliance or malevolence, which may very well be unearned or misguided. What’s striking about the Musk messages, then, is the similarity between these men’s behavior behind closed doors and in public on Twitter. Perhaps the real revelation here is that the shallowness you see is the shallowness you get.

NYMag, on “Elon’s Bad Week: Embarrassing Text Messages and Reports of Settlement Talks”:

There is only so much a man can take, even if he’s the world’s richest. This week in Twitter v. Musk may have been the worst so far for Elon Musk in his attempt to get out of the $44 billion deal to take the company over. On Thursday, the Delaware Chancery Court released texts showing the supposed mastermind is impetuous, does not do well with light criticism, and is surrounded by an embarrassing group of Silicon Valley simps. The next day, the court followed up on a hearing from earlier this week that, too, was bad news for the Tesla techno-king, denying him a cache of documents and hinting at a rapidly draining well of patience in dealing with the sprawling case. And so, after all this, reports have surfaced that there very well may be a deal on the table to avert a trial, which would start in just 17 days…

Musk has a reputation as someone who takes his own counsel, but these texts show that he is actually surrounded by people who push him toward his own worst impulses if they see it as an opportunity to enrich themselves. Jack Dorsey (saved in the phone as “jackjack”) butters him up by telling Musk he’d earlier secretly wanted to install him on the board and how great of a job he’d do turning the company around. Early on, after Musk tweets about free speech —this was in response to Russia Today being banned on Twitter — venture capitalist Antonio Gracias texts him: “I am 100% with you Elon. To the fucking mattresses no matter what ….this is a principle we need to fucking defend with our lives or we are lost to the darkness.” Then there’s Jason Calacanis, the Silicon Valley angel investor and podcaster: “Put me in the game coach! Twitter CEO is my dream job,” he wrote. Later, when Calacanis gets caught shopping around an investment vehicle for relatively small-time investors, Musk tells him to knock it off, that it’s irking Morgan Stanley bankers and his own personal financial adviser and makes it seem as though Calacanis were using him. Calacanis immediately backtracks and does what he’s asked. “You know I’m ride or die brother — I’d jump on a grande for you,” the grown man texted to Musk, presumably meaning “grenade.” …

If you are a defendant in a case with $44 billion on the line, as Musk is, and your strategy is to keep pushing the other side of the case to release more information — all in the hopes of finding something that’s damaging for them — then four words you would really like to avoid hearing from the judge are “plaintiff has done enough.”

But those are exactly the four words that punctuated an order from Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick on Friday in response to Team Musk’s demands for more data. (Twitter has already said that it provided the information it said it would, and McCormick agrees.)

The orders today do not answer everything that Twitter and Musk brought up earlier this week during the omnibus hearing, but the two orders from McCormick show that, with just over two weeks to go, her tolerance for anything beyond the narrow scope of Twitter’s lawsuit is wearing out. To handle some of the more complex discovery issues, McCormick has appointed a special master — essentially saying she no longer wants to deal with them. It’s not good for anybody, but it’s especially bad for Musk…

If it’s attention Musk wanted, well, *that* he is getting…

Quick! Look over there!…

At least *this* year, it’s not “just a person in a robot suit“…

In summary:

Reader Interactions

57Comments

  4. 4.

    PJ

    One of the dangers of being rich and/or powerful is believing that your power and money is some measure of intelligence, merit, or talent (not to mention inhaling all the smoke sycophants want to blow up your ass).

  6. 6.

    mali muso

    Reminds me of that ageless advice (paraphrasing) just to go in “with the confidence of an unqualified white man.”

  7. 7.

    Brent

    @Danielx: I have known and worked for quite a few rich (not super rich) people and I would say many are not really assholes.  That is,  many are reflexively nice people with no instinct towards meanness or cruelty.

    However,  one thing they do all share in common is vastly overestimating their own charm and intelligence.  But everybody around them laughs at their terrible jokes and tells them how smart they are all day.  I imagine self reflection must be quite difficult under those circumstances.

  8. 8.

    Another Scott

    Musk is a troll who loves free attention.

    It’ll be interesting to see how much it’s going to cost him to get out of the contract with Twitter.

    Bloomberg – Tesla misses estimates (from today). They missed again. Will he successfully bail from Tesla’s leadership before his antics kill it too? I guess we’ll see.

    The delivery figures come on the heels of Tesla’s “AI Day” late Friday night, which was largely a recruiting event. Musk showed off a prototype humanoid robot walking and waving its hand, seeking to demonstrate Tesla’s advances in artificial intelligence.

    [ snort! ]

    Huh. James Murdoch is on the board of directors of Tesla. I did not know that. Might explain some things…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  9. 9.

    lollipopguild

    @Danielx: Yes, but they are smart enough to do thing while keeping their mouth shut. People like musk and trump crave constant attention.

  11. 11.

    Frank Wilhoit

    The problem is not that whoever is overconfident.  The problem is that we take overconfident people at their own estimation of themselves.  This is fatal.

  13. 13.

    HinTN

    “I have been at probably every powerful table that you can think of… I have been at foundations, I have worked in corporations, served on corporate boards, I have been at G-summits, I have sat in at the UN: They are not that smart.”

    But but but, “The women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are all above average. “

  16. 16.

    catclub

    @Another Scott: ​
     

    Musk is a troll who loves free attention.

    Twitter should charge him something like $10M ($100M?)
    per tweet
    until the number comes to $44B.

  18. 18.

    Raoul Paste

    I’m pretty sure the Boston Dynamics robots can be readily programmed to mock Elon Musk’s robots

  19. 19.

    catclub

    @HinTN: ​
      Most likely, but when Tesla had a clean sheet and a huge amount of money they did some pretty innovative things in manufacturing – youtube on giant stamping machines.
    That may sustain its lead for a while.

    Tesla being worth more than ALL the other major car makers – combined – was crazy, and still mostly is.

  20. 20.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: I voted for Pritkzer while holding my nose because I assumed he was a rich, asshole millionaire.  I couldn’t have been more wrong about him.  He has been excellent.

  21. 21.

    Another Scott

    @catclub: Maybe Buffett.  Maybe.

    Warning Politico – Bob Herbert – The Plot Against Public Education (from 2014):

    But those were not Gates’s concerns. He was on a mission to transform American education, and he would start with the high schools, which he saw as an embarrassment, almost a personal affront. They were “obsolete,” he declared. “When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad,” he said, “I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow.”

    There used to be a running joke in the sports world about breaking up the Yankees because they were so good. Gates felt obliged to break up America’s high schools because they were so bad. Smaller schools were supposed to attack the problems of low student achievement and high dropout rates by placing students in a more personal, easier-to-manage environment. Students, teachers and administrators would be more familiar with one another. Acts of violence and other criminal behavior would diminish as everybody got to know everybody else. Academic achievement would soar.

    That was Bill Gates’s grand idea. From 2000 to 2009, he spent $2 billion and disrupted 8 percent of the nation’s public high schools before acknowledging that his experiment was a flop. The size of a high school proved to have little or no effect on the achievement of its students. At the same time, fewer students made it more difficult to field athletic teams. Extracurricular activities withered. And the number of electives offered dwindled.

    Gates said it himself in the fall of 2008, “Simply breaking up existing schools into smaller units often did not generate the gains we were hoping for.”

    There was very little media coverage of this experiment gone terribly wrong. A billionaire had had an idea. Many thousands had danced to his tune. It hadn’t worked out. C’est la vie.

    Diane Ravitch has Gates’ number when it comes to education.

    One can make a strong argument that his monopolistic practices did great damage to the US software industry, also too.

    Behind every great fortune lies a great crime – Not Balzac (Any exception proves the rule.)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  22. 22.

    catclub

    Musk is perceived to have power, and these pillars of the tech industry want to be close to it.

    “I love your ‘Twitter algorithms should be open source’ tweet,” Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, said, before suggesting that he was going to mention the idea to members of Congress at an upcoming GOP policy retreat.

    So if Musk DOES end up owning twitter, you can bet those algorithms will be as free as Tesla source code.

  26. 26.

    NaijaGal

    @PJ: This, definitely this!  I still remember the look on Howard Schultz’s face when regular people challenged his desire to be president. Definitely someone who hadn’t heard “No boss, that’s a bad idea,” in over thirty years.

  27. 27.

    Another Scott

    @catclub: Stopped watch.

    In order for the Gates Foundation to keep its tax exempt status, it has to spend at least 5% of its assets every year.  Last I checked, it spends exactly 5% of its assets every year and not a dollar more.

    He likes the power that all those monopoly rents have given him, and he’s not going to give that up a day before he has to.

    (Disclaimer – I haven’t checked the numbers since they hoovered up Buffet’s billions, but I have no reason to think that it’s different now.)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  28. 28.

    bbleh

    It’s a terrible thing when a society’s gods are revealed as false.

    What will the merely lucky opportunists and blinkered techbros and gullible gadget addicts do now?

    Note to grifters: now is the time to start throwing things at the wall and see what absorbs money.

  29. 29.

    catclub

    Some financial writers have started pointing out that you really should not take investment advice from a billionaire. Or follow their example. But most of the financial press will always ask for their advice/opinion.

    Not to mention that whatever they did most likely has extremely low survival rates even though THEY prospered doing that incredibly concentrated thing. Surviorship bias.

  30. 30.

    Anonymous At Work

    The bit about “temporarily serve as a boat” reminds me of the quote about mushrooms: All mushrooms are edible, but some only once.  “All cars can serve as boats, but some last longer than others.”

    And “Cybertruck” was in which episode of Transformers?

  31. 31.

    Starfish

    @Danielx: McKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezo’s ex-wife, seems like a pretty decent person. She left him for her child’s high school teacher because she wanted a normal one, and then she donated a ton of money without a bunch of requirements.

  32. 32.

    Ohio Mom

    I am usually very comfortable with my almost complete lack of knowledge about the inner workings of computer technology but something tells me this post — while entertaining — would have been hilarious if I knew more.

  34. 34.

    Starfish

    @catclub: Bill Gates was so much of an asshole that his wife divorced him. I mean, how much of an asshole do you have to be to get divorced as a billionaire.

    “Oh honey, I will make due with one of our other 11 houses. Let’s never see each other again in this life. No hard feelings. Bye.”

  35. 35.

    azlib

    “blockchain twitter” WTF! I’d be like trying to use an accounting program to plays music videos. I have a feeling many of these CEOs never understood the concept of a blockchain. Michelle is correct, these people are just not that smart.

  38. 38.

    CliosFanBoy

    Ms. Obama’s quote reminds me of a story President Carter told about why he decided to run for President in 1976.  In 1972 the various Democratic hopefuls called on him in his role as Governor of Georgia. Carter got a good look at all these would-be Presidents and thought, “If these guys can do it, so can I!”

  39. 39.

    Kent

    @Danielx: To get to billionaire level wealth at least from nothing I think you have to be an asshole.  You have to step on lots and lots of people on your way up and behave with a single-minded sense of greed.  All those little decisions over time that allow you to accumulate wealth all mean that you are stepping on others.  Employees, partners, venders, etc.

    McKenzie Scott was mostly handed a fortune through marriage.  It doesn’t seem to have changed her, at least not fundamentally.  But I doubt she is the sort of person who would devote her live to making a billion dollars if circumstances were different.

  40. 40.

    Citizen_X

    “Waterproof enough.” Ah, this is an Elon concept that should be more broadly used. “SpaceX Starship is safe enough to be used briefly for part of a space flight.” “The Boeing 777 Max is airworthy enough to be used briefly as an aircraft.” “Tesla is profitable enough to be considered briefly as a worthwhile investment.”

  41. 41.

    Dan B

    @Danielx: The Hanauer family are very good people.  Nick has one TEDx talk about inequality

    Having worked for some very wealthy people it seems that there are two ways to get wealthy, besides inheritance 1. Be scary and intimidating, low morality, 2. Be a great person so everyone you interact with is glad you have money and want you to succeed.

  42. 42.

    CliosFanBoy

    @Kent: I am willing to accept a billion dollars as part of an experiment about the effect of wealth on character. :)

    OK, I confess, the first thing I would do is fund a s***load of animal shelters on the condition that I can come to play with puppies anytime I want. :)

  43. 43.

    Geminid

    A long New York Times article about the Martha’s Vinyard/Migrant story came out this evening. Judd Legum and Daniel Uhlfelder link to it on their Twitter feeds.

    An interesting part of the story is their identification of Perla, one of the women the Vinyard migrants and the second set in San Antonio (who were recruited but not transported) said recruited them. She is Perla Huerta, an Army veteran who was discharged only last month. Her Army duties included combat medic and counterintelligence.

    I could not get very far into the Times article on account of the paywall, but I saw that the San Antonio Sheriff’s Department confirmed Ms. Huerta’s name. Sheriff Salazar’s statement that he was looking into possible violations of law committed in the first flight probably was a factor in the second flight’s cancellation.

    Mr. Uhlfelder is a former Democratic   candidate for Florida Attorney General, He says he learned her name several days ago and was glad to see it confirmed. I’ll probably check him out @DWUhlfelderLaw as it seems he’s following this story and has it in for DeSantis.

    The Times story also said that DeSantis’s gang did not give Texas Governor Greg Abbot a heads up about their project.

  44. 44.

    Tony G

    I have a canoe with a three inch hole in the bottom.  It will “serve briefly as a boat”.  Please throw money at me, venture capitalists!

  45. 45.

    Shalimar

    @Kent: I notice wikipedia now leaves McKenzie Scott’s role in founding Amazon out of her entry and Amazon’s.  She was one of the initial 3 or 4 employees, and Jeff Bezos got the money to start it from her parents.  She wasn’t handed anything.  She was as instrumental in starting the company as he was.

  46. 46.

    Geminid

    @HinTN: Teslas stock closed at a little over $260 a share Friday. That gave it a Price/Earnings ratio of 95.5. By contrast, Toyota’s P/E ratio is 9.66. That tells me that Tesla stock has a lot of potential. Downward potential.

  47. 47.

    RSA

    @Raoul Paste:  I’m pretty sure the Boston Dynamics robots can be readily programmed to mock Elon Musk’s robots

    Doubtless. For what it’s worth, I was talking with a colleague who specializes in legged robotics a while ago, and he told me (if I remember correctly) that it took 18 months to program the Atlas and other robots to do their Do You Love Me? dance. Also, the parkour demonstrations rely on the robot having a precise 3D model of its environment. That is, it’s not making judgments on the fly about its movements; they can be precomputed, however long that takes.

    It’s very impressive and it’s state of the art. It’s staged to a fine degree, however.

  48. 48.

    pacem appellant

    My employer makes EV trucks that actually are waterproof, so part of me is happy that Musk is making his company’s trucks sound so hackishly useless. However, I worry that all EVs get tarnished when he opens his flap, and that affects my employer, my pay, and my evangelism for an electric future.

  49. 49.

    pacem appellant

    @RSA: Since Boston Dynamics has no trouble mounting cannons on their robots, I see no reason why they couldn’t be programmed to use Musk’s as target practice.

  52. 52.

    lowtechcyclist

    Since this is an open thread, I’m looking forward to Adam’s nightly post – if the situation in Ukraine will stay still for long enough to give him a chance to write without immediately being behind the news.

  53. 53.

    RepubAnon

    One of Musk’s side-effects is that his grandiose pronouncements often discourage people from investing in competitors.  Example: people were enthusiastic about high-speed rail until Musk started babbling about HYPERLOOP!  Which was a big nothingburger, but took the wind out of high speed rail proposals.

    People should learn that when Musk speaks, it often does no more than make the grass grow greener

  54. 54.

    pacem appellant

    @HinTN: I’m still mad at VW for the emissions scandal. But lots of my friends drive their ID4s and are happy.

  55. 55.

    Ruckus

    @Danielx:

    There’s probably one or two, the law of averages should play here.

    But I’m not saying yes. I’d bet that living in a world filled with your own farts may not be as healthy as some seem to think.

  56. 56.

    Kent

    @pacem appellant: I will never forgive Elon for making owning a Tesla into a douche-bro statement.  I was Tesla-curious before.  Now I’m looking at Tesla alternatives.  Like maybe the new Nissan Ariya or something.

    Still a year or two off from that decision though.  And it will only happen if the youngest daughter ends up needing a car in college in which case I’ll send her with the older Prius and get an new EV for my wife and myself.

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