https://t.co/87IkPJv24k pic.twitter.com/aazg9abgms
— Charles Gaba (Had a blue check pre-11/07/22) (@charles_gaba) December 19, 2022
Matt Levine, at Bloomberg, can (mostly) make finance understandable even to someone as math-blind as I am. Also, he’s funny, as when he explains why it may not be so easy to find a replacement CEO for Twitter:
… So the proposition is … what? You take all of your money, you give it to Musk to buy equity in his company at a price that you all agree is absurd? And then you get to work for him, running a sullen and broken Twitter according to his ever-shifting whims, until he changes his mind and fires you? And when he fires you he denies you severance and dares you to sue, and accuses you of being a sex criminal?
I am sure that there are Musk fans who do want the job; as I have said, proximity to Elon Musk is what creates value in modern markets, and so throwing away your life savings to work for him might be a good trade. (Also I’m sure he’s kidding about investing your life savings in Twitter.) Still, the candidate pool is probably limited to Musk’s most ardent yes-men. “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it,” Musk also tweeted…
… Like most people, I assume that (1) Musk tweeted this poll because he has already decided to step down as Twitter CEO (since, after all, he said that a month ago!) and (2) he is planning to step down as Twitter CEO to spend more time at Tesla Inc. (since, after all, he said it in a court hearing about how Tesla’s board gave him a record-breaking compensation package to retain his services, and then he went flying off to run Twitter instead). One possibility is that “be careful what you wish for” is directed at Tesla’s board or shareholders. “Sure now you say that you want me back running Tesla full time, but look at the mess I’m making here, are you sure you want that at Tesla too?” Musk owns companies that (1) produce self-driving cars, (2) send rockets into space, (3) make human brain implants and (4) run a website where people make fun of him. If he is having some sort of self-sabotaging meltdown, it is much better for him to spend his time on the making-fun-of-him website than the brain implants or the cars or the rockets. If he messes up the brain implants, people die! If he messes up the website where people make fun of him, they will make fun of him more. If you use Twitter as a source of comedy and a way to get in fights, then it is good for Twitter to be run badly. Rockets don’t work that way.
Or of course “be careful what you wish for” could be a reminder to Musk himself. He wanted to buy Twitter, and oh boy did he ever end up buying Twitter, whoops. Ten million years ago, in April, when Musk first announced that he had taken a stake in Twitter, I wrote:
Look this all makes complete sense, obvious, intuitive, simple sense. If you are the richest person in the world, and annoying, and you constantly play a computer game, and you get a lot of enjoyment and a sense of identity from that game and are maybe a little addicted, then at some point you might have some suggestions for improvements in the game. So you might leave comments and email the company that makes the game saying “hey you should try my ideas.” And the company might ignore you (or respond politely but not move fast enough for your liking). It might occur to you: “Look, I am the richest person in the world; how much could this game company possibly cost? I should just buy it and change the game however I want.” Even if your complaints are quite minor, why shouldn’t you get to play exactly the game you want? Even if you have no complaints, why not own the game you love, just to make sure it continues to be exactly what you want?
And that is more or less what has happened: He bought Twitter, brought back accounts whose politics aligned with his, banned journalists who criticized him, banned mentions of other social media platforms, and generally tailored the Twitter experience to what he thought he wanted.
And yet! From the outside, it does not seem like he is having fun. It turns out that very little of the experience of Twitter is about, like, the software; the edit button does not make anyone happy. The experience of Twitter is about the people, and in the course of running Twitter Musk has made a lot of people mad at him. (In what might be a first in internet message board moderating, Musk’s mom has been tweeting to defend his moderation decisions.) Twitter is about comedy and getting in fights, but it is also about connection, about finding an audience of people who understand and appreciate you. The basic problem is that, if you run a message board, you can tweak the buttons, and you can ban users, but you can’t make the users who are left love you. And for $44 billion you want love…
If I were a Tesla shareholder just having seen what kind of a boss Musk is, I might actually be glad that he’s tied up elsewhere. https://t.co/NSKNpQooWB
— The Fig Economy (@figgityfigs) December 21, 2022
do people really think elon is just gonna head back to tesla and not bring his internet poisoning with him? dude is hooked on the juice, if he steps away from twitter he will be just as bad or worse in a different place https://t.co/R80S2LtdYx
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) December 20, 2022
dude will be out on the shop floor accusing composite inlays of being woke and tweeting at cat turd about how he’s being censored by the marketing department for his demand to auto tune every stereo to infowars
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) December 20, 2022
Poe Larity
Let’s brainstorm on which genius is going to take the helm of Elron’s super app.
dmsilev
@Poe Larity: I’m convinced it will just be Elon Musk wearing a Groucho Marx face mask.
schrodingers_cat
OT Airfryer update. So I did get the Instant Vortex 10qt version yesterday!
dmsilev
Also, even assuming a sane and dedicated CEO, Tesla is facing some substantial challenges. Competition in the electric vehicle field is getting steadily stronger, their first-mover advantage on mass production of batteries and national car-charging networks are shrinking away, their Full Self Drive project is notable primarily for the number of accidents that it causes, their next big mass-market product is a mostly-vaporware pickup truck that looks like it escaped from a circa-2000 SF video game, etc.
Oh, and their stock price is largely based on the idea of Elon Musk, Super Genius, rather than any vaguely rational assessment of the company’s value and future prospects. Based on the price chart, he’s roughly 1/3 the genius he was six months ago, and the degeniusification looks to be continuing in the future.
Bobby Thomson
A lot of this commentary assumes Musk is out of his element or having some kind of post-divorce breakdown. While both things no doubt are true, his nonstop posting has laid bare impulsive and disastrous tantrum-based decision making and a general lack of judgment. He himself has never invented anything and only used his buyout money from PayPal (itself grown from old South African emerald money) to force founders out of companies and claim all their ideas as his own. It also now is obvious that he spends little time at the companies that actually make useful products.
Tesla has been ridiculously overvalued. Even after losing 69% – nice – of its value in a year, the price to earnings ratio of the stock is still around 10, while most auto companies trade around 4. He himself has acknowledged that without successful self driving machines, the company is just another car company. A lot of people with a lot of money believe they have that money because they are geniuses, or at least that they are well-equipped to identify value, and also have bought into the myth that Musk is some kind of wunderkind and not just another plain vanilla spoiled rich kid. That has kept the price insanely high. Since the Twitter acquisition, and in particular in the last two weeks, that myth has evaporated for a lot of investors who are cutting their losses.
Bobby Thomson
This cannot be overemphasized. Margin calls and Twitter bills will force Musk to divest more and more, which will further exacerbate the drop in the share price. At some point either the board sacks him as CEO or someone runs a hostile takeover. Musk is addicted to Twitter and as long as he uses it he cannot stop stepping on his own dick. Remind you of anyone?
Another Scott
MotleyFool from June 6:
Forth, investors could see those statements as ones made by a deluded narcissistic conman and run far away (or short the stock if one has money to play with)…
On June 6, TSLA closed at $238.28. It closed at $123.15 today.
Cheers,
Scott.
cain
Meanwhile on the elephant site – journalists want ‘quote tweeting’ implemented otherwise they are gonna take their stuff and go home.
I rarely seen where quote tweeting helps discourse. It almost always used to do ‘hot takes’ or ‘lazy takes’. It also generates influencers, and also creates a way to gatekeep. Fuck that.
In any case, mastodon is going well. :-) Thanks Elon!
Bobby Thomson
@cain: Journalists seem to be moving to Post. I’m waiting to see where Black Twitter lands, which could be Spoutible.
Another Scott
@cain: The Mastodon folks seem to have thought long and hard about
requote-tweets and have good reasons not to allow them (they’re too easily used to pile-on). I don’t think they’re going to change on that.And good for them.
[eta:] Sorry for messing up the lingo.
Cheers,
Scott.
Scout211
Whut?!!
Frankensteinbeck
@Another Scott:
An interesting argument, and one I find believable. Unfortunately ‘more’ likely here means going up from .1% chance to .2% chance, and I’m being generous. Making unsupported claims about world-shaking products he’s on the verge of releasing is exactly what got his stock so inflated, because so many dumbasses believed him. His delivery rate is downright Trumpian.
dm
Forbes’ profile of Musk (https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/?sh=73825b077999) shows his wealth going from $25 billion in 2019 to six times that amount the following year. This was buoyed by Tesla’s stock evaluation and a private round of funding for SpaceX.
Tesla’s stock evaluation is the only real indicator of Elon Musk’s alleged wealth. SpaceX is privately held, meaning its evaluation is whatever Musk has managed to Elizabeth-Holmes the other private investors out of. The same is true of are the Boring and Lobotomy companies.
Musk’s Twitter DMs were disclosed during the trial between Musk and Twitter over the purchase. They revealed captains of industry (Larry Ellison is one name that I remember) as gullible fanboys.
dmsilev
@Scout211: My theory is that something happened to break that particular feature and Elon Musk Super Genius ™ fired all of the people who knew how to fix it a couple of months ago.
Geoduck
@Bobby Thomson:
Kevin Sorbo!
cain
@Bobby Thomson: Never heard of that place. Is it a fediverse thing or a single place? Wherever it is – I hope it will be a safe place for them all. They deserve it.
cain
@Another Scott: in one thread, anil dash was talking about some alternatives. Basically saying that there will be other clients that implement activitypub and will allow for QTs. I’ll be sticking to clients that don’t implement that.
dm
@Frankensteinbeck:
And those things he’s “going to deliver”? They are things that other very smart and determined people have been working on — with not much success — for decades, and he’s promising delivery in a couple of years?
Now, I think the intelligent-car people have made serious progress — my recent model Prius has a lot of useful driver-assistance features that I am sure are spin-offs from the autonomous vehicle folks. But that’s a long way from a robo-taxi.
Splitting Image
@cain:
I think that there is a good argument to be made for encouraging all of the entertainment-oriented tweeters to go to one site and all of the journalists to go to another.
It has been observed many times that the value of television news cratered when it was folded into the entertainment division and asked to turn a profit. Twitter was basically the logical conclusion of that. Genuine news items and fun people posting cute dog pictures appeared side by side and the news items were judged by how much response they got relative to the guy rating dogs. This was doomed from the start.
I think we would all be better off if there were a Twitter-like place where people could post news stories and be held to news standards, and a completely different Twitter-like place where you could rate pictures of dogs and cats and schmooze with the occasional celebrity.
I hope Mastodon holds the line here.
Burnspbesq
A quick review of available YouTube videos is likely to disabuse you of the notion that FSD is going to realize its potential any time soon.
James E Powell
Whoever takes the CEO job should do so with the understanding that Musk will breach the employment contract. He & Twitter will have to sued. So, document everything from the first conversation to the last.
Citizen Alan
@Bobby Thomson:
Wasn’t there an experiment where psychologists had people play Monopoly under rules that blatantly favored some players over others ? As in most people play by standard rules, but one guy gets $400 for passing Go and can automatically buy his way cheaply out of Jail, while another guy only gets $50 for passing Go and can only get out of Jail by rolling doubles. And yet, despite the obvious unfairness of the game, the player with the unfair advantages and who always won nevertheless would insist that he only won because he made better decisions.
That’s what our oligarchs remind me of.
Another Scott
@dm: I assume the “robotaxi” comments are in response to Waymo One – an actual (very-limited) autonomous taxi service in Phoenix and (maybe) soon in San Francisco. While Melno talks about how great things will be real soon now – just you wait!!1ONE.
Folks paying attention to him should have read up on vaporware by now – it would have saved them a lot of money and heartburn.
Cheers,
Scott.
cain
@Splitting Image:
Eugen has already said that he’s not going to implement it – that means there will be another activitypub based app that will be more business/news/entertainment friendly. You can count on it.
TKH
* “It would appear that a robotaxi ride will cost less than a bus ticket.”
What can a
bananabus ticket cost?TenFifty dollars?Suzanne
@Another Scott: So Waymo tested those cars in Phoenix for years. I, uhhhhhhh, jumped out in front of one once to see if it would stop. (It did.) I submitted to be a test passenger but didn’t get selected. Anyway, Phoenix is a city where it might actually work….streets are very well-maintained and easy to navigate, weather events are rare.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: Everything I’ve read (which isn’t a lot) said that Waymo is doing the self-driving R&D right. They’re going on limited, well-understood routes, they’ve got a zillion sensors and cameras and have the computing horsepower to make sense of all the data, and they’re making sure they get it right before having the public involved. All that has to cost a fortune, but they know that’s what it takes to really understand and address the problem given the state of technology.
Elmon’s FSD is a caricature of what the problem actually demands, and too many people have died because of his hubris.
100 years from now, this self-driving stuff may be old-hat (like having supercomputer phones with cameras and high resolution colors screens in our pockets that can direct us anywhere on the globe…) , but we’re not close to being there yet. Waymo is much closer than Tesla though.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Another Scott: I believe that. I saw those cars in my neighborhood literally for years, almost daily. At first, they had the Google logo on them rather than Waymo, and I kept musing, “Why is the Google Maps car coming by our house so much?”. But each car had at least two operators in it at all times, cameras all over the things.
Dan B
So Elmo has banned a teenage suicide prevention Twitter space.
Great job Elmo Apatheid.
Captain C
@dmsilev: So, the Bobby Valentine approach.
Scout211
@dmsilev: That is now the story (sort of) from Twitter. After I posted that link, Twitter contacted Reuters with an update. #ThereIsHelp is apparently not working but they are working on fixing it. They say . . .
lowtechcyclist
Not sure how it hurts Tesla owners: you’ve already got your car, does it break down more if Emo wreaks havoc at Tesla HQ?
And Tesla investors: jeez, how could you not know how overvalued the stock has been, and still is? If you bought when the stock was selling for a lot more than it is now, it sucks to be you, but you’ve got no one to blame but yourself. And if you bought early enough in the game that you’d still be coming out ahead (or not too far behind) if you sold, then you should do it. The best time to have sold would have been earlier in the year, when the stock was priced way above what it is now. The second best time to sell is now.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Burnspbesq:
Especially if you are a child or the parent of a child in a crosswalk.
lowtechcyclist
@dmsilev:
Singing, “if you think this company’s bad off now, just wait ’til I get through with it.”
JaySinWA
@Scout211: Christmas week is a lovely time to have suicide prevention measures down. Nobody gets depressed at Christmas /s
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist: Bad corporate news destroys resale value of cars. VW TDI owner here. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Ken
@Another Scott: “Beta test” is an unusual way to describe distributing un-tested software to random users, to be informally trialed on public streets and highways. I wonder if they’ve actually written down their test metric anywhere that a court might someday find it — “fewer than 0.1 deaths per 100 miles in autonomous mode”, or some such thing.
Obvious Russian Troll
@lowtechcyclist: Tesla support is reported to be going down the tubes. Even if you need minor repairs, it might take a week and they likely don’t have a loaner for you.
Also will likely affect resale value.
JaneE
The animals already died. Unless the implant is significantly improved people will die. Anyone care to give me odds on the implant and the testing being significantly improved while Musk is micromanaging?
Ken
After what we’ve seen the past couple of months, can we rule out the idea that (with the help of loyal sycophants in Tesla engineering) he has a code he can punch into his phone to trigger the anti-theft systems on every Tesla, bricking the entire fleet?
JaneE
@Obvious Russian Troll: My granddaughter has one, loves it, and got into a minor fender-bender. Her appointment to get it fixed was a couple of months. This was back in May or June. The car was drivable so that may have made a difference in the scheduling, but still that is a long time to wait, with no friendly local body shop able to deal with it.
JaneE
@Obvious Russian Troll: My granddaughter has one, loves it, and got into a minor fender-bender. Her appointment to get it fixed was a couple of months. This was back in May or June. The car was drivable so that may have made a difference in the scheduling, but still that is a long time to wait, with no friendly local body shop able to deal with it.
Another Scott
@Ken:
TheVerge.com (from February):
(Emphasis added.)
Other stories mention that Waymo has over 20M miles of public road driving experience, and no fatalities. tesladeaths.com says there have been 19 Tesla Autopilot fatalities.
Cheers,
Scott.
PaulB
Prior to this mess with Twitter, I only had casual knowledge of Musk, his products, and his reputation. Basically, my impression was that he was something of a visionary, but also someone who occasionally had trouble executing on that vision.
One side effect of the latest disaster is that articles that had been written over the past ten years or so are now coming to light and receiving greater scrutiny. And those articles confirm what we can see with Twitter:
1. He’s a horrible people manager.
2. He’s a terrible CEO.
3. He’s not much of a visionary.
4. His ego is out of control, as is his desperate need for attention and need to be loved.
5. He’s incredibly thin-skinned.
6. He refuses to listen to those with greater knowledge and experience.
7. He refuses to learn from past mistakes.
8. His prior successes have largely been in spite of him, not because of him. I have no trouble believing the reports from SpaceX and Tesla that he has people very carefully “managing” him and doing their best to mitigate the damage he routinely causes.
8. He’s a master of vaporware.
On that last point, so much of what he has promised has completely failed to materialize, and quite likely never will. He’s no closer to a fully automated Tesla factory than he was when they had to put together a tent-covered assembly line in a parking lot years ago. He’s no closer to a fully autonomous self-driving car than he was years ago, and his decisions (e.g., to use cameras only and not use LIDAR) have made it highly unlikely that he will ever achieve that. The Boring Company can’t actually deliver anything, his solar roof tiles never really got off the ground, his robot demos have been fake, there is no hyperloop (which is good, since it’s a terrible idea), and his neural link project has yet to achieve anything that hadn’t already been accomplished in the early 2000s.
So, he spent $44 billion to inform low-information people like me that he’s an incompetent, narcissistic nincompoop. Mission accomplished!
PaulB
What I find frustrating is that there have been multiple people writing thoughtful, well-researched articles over the past decade that revealed exactly who Musk was. So why did none of the major news sources pick up on those articles and show a broader audience just who Musk really was? Why were they so assiduous in propping up, and never questioning, his oh-so-carefully cultivated reputation? Maddening.
Ohio Mom
@PaulB: Me too. Musk was like the Kardashians, a famous person I was vaguely aware of but didn’t care about in the least. Turned my ears off when I heard him mentioned.
Hah! Now I care about him because he’s screwing up Twitter and I like Twitter.
Geminid
@PaulB: Musk’s Neuro Link project makes me think of a horror flick where a bunch of chimpanzees tortured by a narcissistic industrialist’s experiments revolt and capture him and strap him to a table so they can implant one of his neural links in his brain.
But then he escapes and outruns the pursuing chimps and makes it to the highway and flags down an approaching vehicle but it’s one of his self-driving cars and it recognizes him so it accelerates and runs him over.
Jinchi
@Geminid: Even taking it at face value, what is the purpose of a neuro link for the average person? You get a chip implanted in your brain and then ….. What?
What’s the use case that would justify brain surgery?
Jinchi
Just a guess, but maybe they prefer not to recruit suicidal passengers?
bjacques
@Another Scott: wouldn’t that Tesla FSD option be an example of “gamma testing”, where customers pay to work out the bugs of a feature that really shouldn’t have been released yet?
And that horror movie should also feature the ghost of Nikola Tesla taking revenge for ruining his good name.
Matt McIrvin
@Jinchi: The science-fiction idea was always that you could use the implant to effectively adopt an artificial body, experience some mechanical system as if it were your physical presence, or directly inhabit cyberspace. In the world of Samuel Delany’s Nova, everyone had implants that allowed them to experience whatever abstract thing they were doing as a personal physical experience, and it was the solution to alienated labor.
The reality… well… I doubt it’s ever that good or that easy. But most things Musk does are motivated by some kind of science-fiction dream, and I suspect that’s the operative one here.
Matt McIrvin
@cain: It’s not just journalists; there seems to be a major cultural clash going on between old Mastodon and Twitter refugees over QTing.
I have no strong opinions about it personally. But I see a lot of minority/marginalized posters who see QTs as a tool to call out bigoted behavior when the mods won’t handle it (and they do NOT trust the mods to handle it).
Whereas the Mastodon old hands are coming at it from an attitude of “assume everyone starts out playing nice and nudge them in the direction of continuing to play nice”. And I wonder if this philosophy is going to scale at all. I suspect that a lot of the perceived niceness of Mastodon is not any consequence of the design or the tech, but is just because the masses aren’t there yet. But they are coming. My experience of 30+ years of jumping between online fora and social media platforms is that they all wither or turn to shit eventually; it’s just a question of where to jump to when that happens.