OPINION | Silicon Valley is not a superhero incubator. Its leaders are not gods. Many of them aren’t even geniuses. The longer we remember this, the better we’ll be at preventing history from repeating itself again. And again. And again. https://t.co/70jDG6C6QL
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) November 24, 2022
… A Nov. 21 New York Times piece claims that this is just Elon Doing Elon, running Twitter the same way he ran Tesla and SpaceX in the early days. While the reporters express a healthy skepticism that this approach will work at a company as different as Twitter, they also leave it to the realm of possibility that this is all part of a playbook that has worked before and may work again.
Meanwhile, while Musk isn’t saying much to the media, he certainly is Tweeting Through It, breaking shit and claiming I meant to do that—flipping his L’s around and sticking them together, telling us they’ve been W’s all along. (Elon, those are clearly L’s. We can see the Scotch tape.)…
Of course, expansion and contraction are inevitable regardless of the industry. But there’s something more going on with what we’re seeing across tech right now. It feels bigger than the gentle waving of the Invisible Hand. It looks like a bunch of guys who were heralded as geniuses, then made a bunch of bad calls, and now reality is finally catching up to them…
this is very, very good. you should read it. I’m pretty set on a theory where there’s an impending clash between the two main classes of billionaires – the quiet lurkers, and the noisy maniacs. the quiet lurkers are very unhappy about the noisy maniacs upsetting the apple cart. https://t.co/MIRuH7OTAV
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) November 23, 2022
… Those of us who have been questioning reality in the last year – pointing at things that seem stupid and saying “hey, isn’t that really dumb?” have had the grim edification of watching bad ideas that suck get punished. Elon Musk has had the chance to show us what decades of business acumen have meant for Twitter – by which I mean a continually chaotic stage play where a 56-year-old billionaire is humiliated thousands of times a day as he runs a company into the ground. Musk restored twice-impeached retiree Donald Trump over the weekend based on a poll of users, only for Trump to keep his promise that he wouldn’t be returning to the platform, leading to several embarrassing posts where Musk attempted to act as if Trump was desperate to placate a Twitter addiction he’d long since shed…
… The regular people I talk to – those who are not continually shoving their head in the online septic tank – generally view Twitter as a dying business run by a giant child. The exterior view of Musk has changed from “guy with electric cars and rockets” to “Rich Guy Having Mental Health Crisis,” something more approaching a contestant on a terrible reality show than a cool business guy that they want to see win.
While perhaps I’m blowing it out of proportion, Trump refusing to tweet after being unbanned has to be one of the most embarrassing moments in Elon Musk’s life. Trump has always had a knack for getting under other wretched weirdos’ skins, and there was very little value in him returning to Twitter now that he’s not president. While Truth Social is a terrible place, it is exactly what Trump wanted from Twitter – a place he can post anything and receive thousands of posts of “wonderfully said, sir!” from people in their 70s with names like PatriotLord who use incredible amounts of camera filters. Twitter was never about spreading a message for our 45th president – it was always about adulation, and he has now found that elsewhere.
Musk exists in a painful vacuum where he can’t seem to do what he really wants to do. His ideas to “fix” Twitter’s verification system have failed, and he has ostracized large chunks of the advertisers that actually make the site money. The media has been ruthless in eviscerating his dealmaking and business practices. Despite claiming to rebuff his interest in the Twitter deal, Musk may have taken Sam Bankman-Fried’s money. And despite his outright disgust toward journalists, I believe that Musk is deeply hurt by the floods of negative press he’s earned, yearning for the days when every little outburst was met with positive articles from CNBC and Inc Magazine. For the best part of a decade the media – with some exceptions – failed to actively interrogate his myth, and as it crumbles down, every publication is intent on making sure they’re on the right side of history…
We are in the post-fantasy era of technology, where tolerance has dropped for those that have manifested riches and empires based on complete fantasy. Whatever the result, reality has begun to set in on those who assumed their luck would never run out. They fucked around, and they’re about to find out.
it’s an intricate dance & delicate balance convincing enough people you need your billionaire ass left unbothered by taxes & rules to go about continuing to do the ingenious things you swear you did to become a billionaire, and the noisy maniacs are really pissing in the tent
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) November 23, 2022
now you’ve got the worlds preeminent billionaire a half tick away from posting about drinking his own piss to ward off the demon spirits dwelling beneath the secret underground woke pyramid, and a whole host of others printing imaginary computer money so they can bang their board
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) November 23, 2022
Watching the world's richest man descend ever deeper into the Q-hole has been amazing. I blame economic anxiety 1/ https://t.co/Y7jjjsweXM
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) November 24, 2022
One thing I haven’t seen discussed, however, is how inequality has magnified the influence of paranoid plutocrats. There have always been super-rich people disconnected from reality; that’s what being surrounded by sycophants can do. But they matter much more now 2/
To put some numbers to it: 50 years ago J.Paul Getty was America’s richest man, and a very strange guy. But he was worth “only” ~$2 billion. Until recently Musk was worth >100X times that. 3/
True, a billion $ isn’t what it used to be: nominal GDP up by a factor of ~20, total wealth somewhat more. But Musk’s spending power is still much bigger relative to America than Getty’s was. So his solipsism can do far more damage than that of billionaires past 4/
The point is that being ultra-rich was always dangerous to one’s mental health. But these days it matters more to the rest of us than it did in a more equal society 5/
tjmn
Well, hey, howdy! A dumb ass billionaire. How many are we up to now?
Ken
@tjmn: All of them, Katie.
Josie
Maybe there should be some kind of limit to how much a person can inherit. I don’t know – maybe some kind of inheritance tax.
ETA: Or, hear me out here, some kind of equitable income tax system, in which a retired teacher on a pension pays a higher percentage of income than a billionaire.
MattF
I reached the “hang on a sec… this guy is an asshole” moment during the underground rescue business, so all this is not a huge revelation to me. I realize that the news biz is motivated to reward and publicize Musk, but it really is time to look elsewhere for saviors.
ETA: Or, perhaps…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ve become a fan of Kara Swisher and her podcast in part because of the almost-dismissive skepticism she brings to her discussions of Musk and his fellow would-be titans. She did an interview with Twitter’s now-fired “Head of Trust and Safety”, which I think means chief content moderator, two days before Elmo reached out to Mr Vampire-Squid, and apparently (I haven’t had a chance to listen to it) they discussed the Hunter thing in a much less hyperbolic way than Musk’s chosen PR flak. I suspect that’s why Musk reached out to Taibbi. I have a hunch he’s obsessed with Swisher and what she says about him, kind of like trump and the NYT
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Does this story feature a segment were they interview the lunch time crowd at a Fremont Dennie’s to get the vibe?
By “we” I assume the writer means the MSM, Anyone who been involved in the Valley will have seen plenty of examples of successful CEOs, hitting it big, thinking they can no wrong and doing a complete face plant, like say Steve Jobs in the mid ’80s.
Considering that Interns account of the Culture of Musk management at SpaceX, apparently that Musk is a completely insane phony is quite obvious to anyone who bothered to take look, if only there was a group of people did that for a living.
p.a.
There’s this insane strand in Americans’ thought that “that
canwill be me someday”, when anyone with a decent grasp of reality knows those billionaire turds are the BEST EVER evidence for a substantial estate tax there is.Frankensteinbeck
Still boggled by the ludicrous amounts of money corporations are pouring into Metaverse.
Also, Elon has released internal documents demonstrating that the political conspiracy theories were false. That he continues to claim(believe?) they are true is so very conservative. They know they’re being oppressed! It’s truthiness all the way down.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, well it’s a fact Joseph Stalin has never had a tweet of his deleted on Twitter. So Checkmate Libertards.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
the whole “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” thing needs to be updated by one letter
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Maybe it’s some kind of tax avoidance scheme? They really can’t be still thinking Zuckeberg is an genius who sees the future at this point.
laura
The current fall of civilization is solely due to the sausage fest. Why are the masters of the universe such wanking large adult male children?
Also, too, a billionaire is both a crime and a policy failure. Fix this shit with confiscatory tax rates that scrape back idle capital from the soft palms of the monied class or we are doomed.
Barbara
Musk has clearly gone off the rails, but it is unusual for someone to undertake three ventures in a row that counted as successes — PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX. I think most “masters of the universe” in this space have enough insight to realize that even a single success depends at least in part on stars beyond their control aligning. The loudest among them do not seem to include the most consequential, e.g., Sergey Brin.
I mean, like most new businesses, most tech ventures fail. Musk may be singularly clueless, but you should always assume that someone screaming for attention is on the verge of disaster.
And crypto currency — OMG — it’s like the the perfect case for establishing as a matter of incontrovertible proof that dupes are attracted to sociopaths like moths to a flame.
eachother
I’d rather work for millionairs.
Calouste
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Facebook is now down 60% compared a year ago, where the Nasdaq is only down 22%. Investors certainly have second thoughts about the genius of Zuck.
Kay
It is the most conventional thing in the world for a middle aged wealthy man to bitch about labor unions and ungrateful (younger) employees and to be a Republican and use his wealth to advocate on behalf of Republican pols who will cut his taxes and gut any environmental and safety regs that get in his way.
Musk is ordinary. Just call him a wealthy Republican. That’s all he is.
Kay
If there is something on the laptop that indicates that Joe Biden is involved in something corrupt I wish the transparency troops on the Right would release it. Or are they once again grifting and leading the dupes who pay them around by the nose for as long as it’s profitable.
How fucking long have they been teasing this laptop? Three years. If they had anything on Biden we would have seen it by now. What they have is Hunter Biden self-produced porn, which they seem to be salivating over (ick).
laura
@Kay: gym Jordan is just beside himself for the Hunter Biden dick pics.
Frank Wilhoit
What Ed Zitron does not point out is that the VCs would rather lose all their money than pay any taxes on it, which they would have to do if they left it sit idle. So their behavior will not change, and what their targets will have to do to generate “buzz” will only get more and more absurd.
laura
@Kay: gym Jordan is just beside himself for the Hunter Biden dick pics.
artem1s
I’d love to see the country and especially the media stop pretending these companies are run by one person. Or that developing new advanced technology happens in some guy’s garage. Real science and business running is kind like watching water boil. It’s pretty boring. So the media focuses on the soap opera queen in the room instead.
Frank Wilhoit
@laura: Billionaires are only one sign of the eclipse of accountability: perhaps the noisiest, but far from the most ubiquitous and therefore far from the most important.
Josie
@laura:
I hope someone is gathering up history on Jordan to send out. He does not exactly have clean hands. Someone needs to remind him of this.
Anoniminous
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think it is hysterically funny.
The globe is awash in Cash and Cash Equivalents. The people whose job it is to invest it don’t know what to do with it all. So when someone comes along with a suitable barrage of bullshit they throw a bunch of money at them and the world gets Evernote, Zynga, Powa Technologies, Quibi, WeWork, Theranos, FTX, & etc.
Second Life…. I mean … “Metaverse” is just another one along the way.dm
@Kay: putting Hunter Biden’s business dealings in the spotlight means when people bring up grifting Trump offspring they can say, “Now you care about grifting kids? Hypocrites.”
It’s a strategy I’ve heard credited to Karl Rove: pre-emptively attack your opposition for a vulnerability you have yourself. Swift-boating Kerry (plus the whole kerning thing) took Bush’s National Guard service of the agenda.
Hunter Biden cutting deals in Ukraine (which ties into the laptop), gives them an opening for “Now you care about sweet deals in Slavic nations?” when the issue of coziness with Put in comes up.
Geminid
@Kay: I thought the biggest consequence of the laptop story was that the Trump team wasted messaging resources on this story, and in the critical last weeks of the campaign. They thought they had a missile that would blow Joe Biden out of water, but it turned out to be a damp squib.
They would have done better to use that messaging bandwidth trying to fool people into believing that Trump had created a fundamentally stronger economy. But any messaging strategy would have been better than the laptop gambit.
I think a lot of their obsession now is retrospective “coulda, woulda, shoulda” thinking, trying to vindicate a strategic error by showing the laptop story is a powerful weapon after all. Republicans still can’t make it work, though, and are just burning up more messaging resources
NobodySpecial
Those of us not in the club or anywhere adjacent have known forever that the rich, the famous, the powerful, are all just as deeply fucked up as most of the people we meet on the daily, if not more fucked up.
But there’s damned little to do about it. Their money is paper and fantasies, so you can’t physically take it from them. You can’t get it out of them any other way, because money talks, even unicorn money, and the lawmakers are all wannabes currying favor and money. They get no bennies from screwing over the MotU’s, they just get a funded opposition candidate who’ll run over them at the first sign of weakness. And at some point they literally can’t lose enough money to matter, even. So what if Musk has 50 billion or 200 billion? He’ll still fuck up everything until he dies, and then his kids will continue as our new monarchy.
Best to keep your head down and save who you can.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Geminid: also, besides what @dm: says above, it’s yet one more manifestation of “The Cruelty Is The Point”. They think this will humiliate Joe Biden, in part because trump can’t comprehend the idea of being a loving, supportive father, and humiliation is an end in itself.
kindness
I read through Krugman’s Twitter thread. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked that so many people blamed Krugman for today’s chaos. I’m not a Twitter person so I don’t know if this a recent tangent of Twitter or if it’s always been this way. Seems to me the fascists are taking over Twitter and the normals are lashing out at everyone who has had a voice. And bare with me, Krugman isn’t always right but I don’t blame him for the NY Times awfulness.
dm
Those billionaires? A lot of Musk’s “money” is paper he prints himself.
This profile in Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/ points out that the bulk of his wealth is in the privately-held SpaceX. Whatever the source of his wealth, it suddenly gained six times is value in 2021, and added a few more increments in 2022.
Some of that is Tesla stock, about half of which is collateral for loans (and which has lost about one-third of its value in the past year).
Elizabeth Holmes has taught us that, with sufficient hype, you can talk private investors into valuing anything. SpaceX’s rockets actually do work, eventually, so there’s that.
Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: That strikes me as a poor political strategy. The laptop hearings Republican propose may please their base base, but in general Republicans need to attract voters outside their base. I think that the hearings will make “normies” see House Republicans as a pack of malicious cranks, which is what they are.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Geminid: oh yeah, this crew is gonna make Newt Gingrich in the nineties look like a sober-sided statesman of great probity
dm
@Geminid: maybe, but don’t forget that “Hillary’s emails” were the payoff from the Benghazi hearings. They may be hoping for a flea to strain at emerging from some random comment in their raft of hearings about this and that.
Or, you know, if they blow enough smoke they may get the credulous to think there might be a fire.
sdstarr
I think most tech Billionaires have some exceptional qualities, combined with good luck, that have allowed them to succeed at specific business ventures. What makes them look like idiots is that they – and everyone else – believes that their expertise in one area means they can be equally expert in politics, journalism, and constitutional law.
The tech billionaires not dumbasses, they’re just speaking outside of their area of expertise. Sort of like Jordan Peterson opining about foreign policy.
Kay
@Geminid:
They can’t seem to get a read on Joe Biden, which amuses me because I think Biden’s normal – they’re all freaks so it stands to reason they don’t understand him :)
I read that Newt Gingrich wants Republicans to stop underestimating Joe Biden – they aren’t supposed to portray him as bumbling anymore- they are supposed to portray him as an evil mastermind. They don’t have a clue who he is.
Remember Trump’s big bombshell delivery of “HUNTER!” at the debate? It fell flat because Biden wasn’t ashamed- Biden was quietly appalled at how classless and gross and mean spirited they are.
Jay C
TBH, I’ve never viewed Elon Musk’s obsession with buying Twitter as a example of “Rich Guy Having Mental Crisis” as one of “Rich Guy Trying To Become Major Political Player”. In Elon’s case, manifested though the purchase, and operation as a personal plaything of a (if not THE) major social-media platform. However, I think he may have -just slightly- overestimated the appeal of a right-wing hate-cesspool as a venue for users and advertisers. Which, neverminding all the self-righteous bluster about “free speech”, is what Twitter will inevitably become without a strong moderation policy.
Yeah, Musk now has control of a Big Freakin’ Megaphone: it’s just that the audience for his supposed “message” is going to be limited, and likely ever-diminishing. Too bad…
Kay
@kindness:
Twitter is ruined because Right wingers ruin everything. There is nothing they touch that they leave better than they found it.
It’s too bad. I think it’s time to bail though, for normal people, people who aren’t journalists or using Twitter to sell their work – monetizing it. Musk might send his celebrity contrarians out after normies – he can release anyone’s personal communicati0ons- next and there’s not enough upside for someone who is a non commercial user.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
The two are not mutually exclusive, though I don’t know if there’s a psychiatric diagnosis for “OD’d on his own Kool-Aid”. He’ll be walking around with Kleenex boxes on his feet before too long.
Kay
It’s great that these aging former “edgy contrarians” are building careers out of racy celebrity photos.
“Scandalous!” they say as they pore over the Hunter sex photos.
More conventional and boring than any member of the local Rotary Club. Stodgy older men.
PaulB
I can add Bezos to the list of overrated “geniuses.” At least in my area of Amazon, what we accomplished was generally *in spite* of Bezos, not because of him.
In the recent thread here about “The Mythical Man Month,” I immediately thought of my tenure at Amazon because leaders there routinely tried to pretend that they could ignore the lessons of that book and rewrite reality when it came to developing software. [Narrator’s voice: “They couldn’t.”]
Matt McIrvin
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Gingrich just popped up in the news saying that Republicans were greatly underestimating Biden and that he was “winning”.
Whatever. When the notification popped up with Newt Gingrich’s name I was mostly disappointed he hadn’t died.
JaneE
I have only met personally one very rich man, over a half century ago, through my college. He was actually a very nice person, and genuinely interested in meeting and talking with people of all kinds. I wish I could say the same for his wife and children, but they fit the stereotype of spoiled rich to a tee.
I have been fairly successful. How I turned out was shaped by when, where, and to whom I was born as much as anything innate to me. I had some really good teachers who encouraged me to continue my education, when my parents never even finished high school. I can claim a basic intelligence as innate, but that is about it. Right now I would put my smarts on par or better Musk, if only because he has been exceptionally dumb about the whole Twitter acquisition from the beginning.
I was on the leading edge of the baby boom, and had a college degree when those were exceptional and highly prized. I was also good at what I did, but the job I would wind up with for a career was never anything I had planned for, and I only considered it because of a chance meeting in a coffee shop that lead to helping someone do something that put me on the periphery of computing. Without that bit of circumstance, I would never have even contemplated programming computers and solving problems for a living.
Who knows what I could have been if I had rich parents? Most likely someone I would not like today.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
It’s too long, but otherwise I nominate this for a rotating tag.
Burnspbesq
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
It’s mostly FOMO (fear of missing out).
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@JaneE: I too am an early Baby Boomer (1951) and fell into programming. I had majored in history in college and gone on to get a MLS and was looking for a job as a librarian in the early 1970s when a random someone said to me “If you like cataloging books, you’ll love computer programming”, and they were right! As a non-math person, programming had never seemed possible, and then I discovered it was logic. I can do logic. (And patience, and attention to detail, and being able to hold abstractions in your head. I can do those too).
And I could get a job in computers, whereas librarian jobs were thin on the ground in 1973.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@kindness: No, Krugman is the primary reason I still have a subscription to the FNYT. When he makes a mistake he recognizes it, and he usually isn’t wrong.
boatboy_srq
Internet 2.1 (Internet 2.0 was the immediate post-dot-bomb “practical Internet” and 1.0 was,… well,…) was doomed to failure just like its predecessors. For every Amazon or Google or Meta there are a dozen Pets.com and Webvan lookalikes. Internet 2.1 was delayed only because the real estate bubble looked (at least to the analysts) more profitable and less risky than another bright idea from a bunch of kids who couldn’t see the future beyond their toys’ acquisition by some bigger entity.
Musk was Ellison; now he’s something between McAfee and Ken Lay. I’m just munching popcorn and waiting for the other shoe to drop.
boatboy_srq
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: To your point, I suspect Jordan, McCarthy, Gaetz, Gosar and the rest can’t comprehend being even a competent parent either.
boatboy_srq
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Ditto.
Perhaps:
Kayla Rudbek
@Anoniminous: and they aren’t investing in real science and engineering (like pollution mitigation, manufacturing, etc).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@boatboy_srq: I was thinking the other day about when Gaetz claimed to be a father because he hired and ex-girlfriend’s little brother as IIRC a gofer on his House campaign, and had the kid to his parents’ house at Xmas
YY_Sima Qian
Very late to this thread, but not only should we not lionize the tech titans in Silicon Valley, we should not lionize tech titans anywhere, just like we should not have lionized the corporate titans in the 90s & 00s.