Rebranding was so urgent that he didn’t wait for a finished logo? I have to admit, I’m baffled. With his other changes I can at least imagine a thought process behind it, this one seems to be something he just woke up and decided to do all of a sudden.
He’s not, though. He’s had plenty of successful companies that have done some pretty amazing things, and he’s become a multi-hundred-billionaire starting from a relatively extremely small amount of seed funding.
I suspect that his successes in other fields may have led him to think he would be just as good at running a social media company, which isn’t going so well for him.
He bought a company that got bought by PayPal. He didn’t build anything he didn’t run anything. He bought an existing company that got bought out. At SpaceX and Tesla they have entire structures created to stop Elon from fucking up shit and to manage him. If you need your company organized to manage the owner and stop them from fucking shit up you don’t get to claim to be smart or to build amazing stuff. In every case it’s the engineers that build amazing things despite Elon’s involvement. Elon himself is an idiot.
If Elon’s an idiot who doesn’t do anything, then why are so many of his companies successful at the revolutionary things they try? How’s Blue Origin doing with its rockets, for example?
I think there’s a very clear theme of “I don’t like this person therefore I believe he has no positive qualities whatsoever” going on here.
Because he’s a rich fuck who inherited emerald mine money to get his start, and he got lucky with his first buys and got an in with other rich fucks, and he buys good companies and sometimes he doesn’t wreck them?
Snopes article on the “emerald money” story. TLDR, “A story about Musk’s father once owning an emerald mine evolved into a larger rumor that had no evidence to support its central claim.”
Musk’s first company was Zip2, which he co-founded with two other people and $28,000 of seed capital from his father. He eventually sold his share to Compaq for $22 million, and used that money to co-founded X.com, an online bank. X.com eventually did a merger with Paypal, giving Musk %11 of the shares of the merged company, which when Paypal was bought by eBay gave him $175.8 million. Next up was SpaceX, which he founded with that money. It wasn’t until a few years later that he bought into an existing company, Tesla, using a $6.5 million investment to buy a majority share. Tesla was quite small then as car companies go and didn’t build its first car until after Musk’s acquisition.
Seems to me like a consistent pattern of building up companies from small to large and then cashing out to start the next one going.
I am in no way saying that Elon Musk is a good person or that he’s doing well with Twitter (though we don’t know the company’s internal cash flows so it could actually be that it’s becoming more profitable - we’ll see in the long run). I’m just saying that this Reddit hivemind stuff is getting tedious and silly. He was not a “rich fuck” when he started out, I have more money right now than Musk did back then. He is not a moron. He’s an asshole, an egotist, and not good at many things. But he’s definitely good at some things and has done quite well by it.
While he obviously has some intelligence, he’s still very much an idiot. One just has to look at his immature and mostly incoherent public relations and business decisions to see that. Further, as smart as he thinks he is, he’s not designing rockets. He pays much smarter people than him to do that for him.
People will often say that very rich people MUST be extremely intelligent, after all - they have more money than you!
I would counter that sociopathy and the ability to work with a complete lack of morals is what allows people to truly become wealthy. There’s no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
Hardly. There are plenty of people who are as smart or smarter than Elon Musk who haven’t struck it big. Given his net worth there are huge numbers of people like that who haven’t struck it big.
I’m just pointing out that accomplishing what he’s accomplished probably means he isn’t dumb. Not in certain fields of expertise, at any rate. I’m only arguing that the “ha ha, he’s a moron!” reactions here are not particularly plausible.
Saddle Twitter with the debt you now have as a result of buying Twitter
Invite all the previously-banned bigots and hatemongers back on the site
Make your staff’s lives hell, including bullshit ‘performance’ stuff like checking how many lines-of-code they write, so most of them are either fired or leave on their own
Raise API prices sky-high, get ridiculed
Lock everything behind user log-in, logged-out users can’t see anything
Rate-limit how many things logged-in users can do
Break widgets
Was once the public square of the internet, now weather services are moving to Mastodon
“why are we still losing money >:(”
Initiate a half-assed rebrand to “X” but the logo, 𝕏, is literally just a mathematical symbol. Who needs copyright on your billion dollar company’s brand identity, eh?
Whoa, be careful everyone, these are the slick moves of a master genius!
It’s entirely possible that he was smart, I’m sure he was to an extent, but I believe that Space X and Tesla have better structures in places for managing/limiting Musk’s direct influence, and I also believe that, like many of the super rich, he’s succumbed to a form of right-wing brain rot over the years. His brain is now smooth and toxic.
That’s not my point. I said that Musk had done well with his other non-Twitter companies and you responded “but look at how terrible he is at running Twitter!”
“It’s entirely possible that he was smart, I’m sure he was to an extent, but I believe that Space X and Tesla have better structures in places for managing/limiting Musk’s direct influence, and I also believe that, like many of the super rich, he’s succumbed to a form of right-wing brain rot over the years. His brain is now smooth and toxic.”
Snopes article on the “emerald money” story. TLDR, “A story about Musk’s father once owning an emerald mine evolved into a larger rumor that had no evidence to support its central claim.”
i mean, that’s still way more wealthy than most people. i don’t think i know anybody who had 28,000 buckaroos of money to burn on their child’s business venture. and the article that you linked does say that musk’s dad made around 400,000 dollars off the emerald mine, which is… still more wealth than most people will see in their lifetime. according to Errol, he sent money he made off the emerald mine and by selling his yacht to Elon and Kimbal to pay for living expenses while they were studying in the US.
Most people don’t get seed money from their parents, but the median American will inherit $70K from their parents.
Regardless, most people who start a business can take out a loan. And to put things in perspective, even opening a fast food restaurant will require over $200K.
In other words, the advantage that $28K gave Musk was nowhere near enough to open a small restaurant, much less automatically turn him into a billionaire.
What other changes has a thought process behind them? Virtually everything he’s done at twitter has seemed like something that occurred to him while shitting and then he forced his team to implement by the end of the day.
Twitter was apparently losing a lot of money before he bought it, so laying off a bunch of staff is one reasonable way to deal with that. Same with charging for the API, getting rid of data centers and offices, and even login requirements to reduce bandwidth and infrastructure costs.
These were all things done as an attempt at solving problems. They may not have been good solutions, but as I said, you can understand the thought process behind them. “We’re spending more than we take in. So do things to reduce spending and boost income.”
I have no idea what problem this rebranding is supposed to solve, though. When Facebook changed to Meta, or Google changed to Alphabet, I could understand those because their name had become associated with only a very specific subset of what the company wanted to do. Twitter is still just being Twitter, though. Unless perhaps he’s got some big new project he’s planning for them to start doing that’s distinct from microblogging.
Rebranding was so urgent that he didn’t wait for a finished logo? I have to admit, I’m baffled. With his other changes I can at least imagine a thought process behind it, this one seems to be something he just woke up and decided to do all of a sudden.
It becomes a lot easier to understand when you remember that he might just be kinda stupid :)
He’s not, though. He’s had plenty of successful companies that have done some pretty amazing things, and he’s become a multi-hundred-billionaire starting from a relatively extremely small amount of seed funding.
I suspect that his successes in other fields may have led him to think he would be just as good at running a social media company, which isn’t going so well for him.
He bought a company that got bought by PayPal. He didn’t build anything he didn’t run anything. He bought an existing company that got bought out. At SpaceX and Tesla they have entire structures created to stop Elon from fucking up shit and to manage him. If you need your company organized to manage the owner and stop them from fucking shit up you don’t get to claim to be smart or to build amazing stuff. In every case it’s the engineers that build amazing things despite Elon’s involvement. Elon himself is an idiot.
If Elon’s an idiot who doesn’t do anything, then why are so many of his companies successful at the revolutionary things they try? How’s Blue Origin doing with its rockets, for example?
I think there’s a very clear theme of “I don’t like this person therefore I believe he has no positive qualities whatsoever” going on here.
Because he’s a rich fuck who inherited emerald mine money to get his start, and he got lucky with his first buys and got an in with other rich fucks, and he buys good companies and sometimes he doesn’t wreck them?
He didn’t build any of it.
Snopes article on the “emerald money” story. TLDR, “A story about Musk’s father once owning an emerald mine evolved into a larger rumor that had no evidence to support its central claim.”
Musk’s first company was Zip2, which he co-founded with two other people and $28,000 of seed capital from his father. He eventually sold his share to Compaq for $22 million, and used that money to co-founded X.com, an online bank. X.com eventually did a merger with Paypal, giving Musk %11 of the shares of the merged company, which when Paypal was bought by eBay gave him $175.8 million. Next up was SpaceX, which he founded with that money. It wasn’t until a few years later that he bought into an existing company, Tesla, using a $6.5 million investment to buy a majority share. Tesla was quite small then as car companies go and didn’t build its first car until after Musk’s acquisition.
Seems to me like a consistent pattern of building up companies from small to large and then cashing out to start the next one going.
I am in no way saying that Elon Musk is a good person or that he’s doing well with Twitter (though we don’t know the company’s internal cash flows so it could actually be that it’s becoming more profitable - we’ll see in the long run). I’m just saying that this Reddit hivemind stuff is getting tedious and silly. He was not a “rich fuck” when he started out, I have more money right now than Musk did back then. He is not a moron. He’s an asshole, an egotist, and not good at many things. But he’s definitely good at some things and has done quite well by it.
While he obviously has some intelligence, he’s still very much an idiot. One just has to look at his immature and mostly incoherent public relations and business decisions to see that. Further, as smart as he thinks he is, he’s not designing rockets. He pays much smarter people than him to do that for him.
People will often say that very rich people MUST be extremely intelligent, after all - they have more money than you!
I would counter that sociopathy and the ability to work with a complete lack of morals is what allows people to truly become wealthy. There’s no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
Uh the just world fallacy it’s strong in you.
Hardly. There are plenty of people who are as smart or smarter than Elon Musk who haven’t struck it big. Given his net worth there are huge numbers of people like that who haven’t struck it big.
I’m just pointing out that accomplishing what he’s accomplished probably means he isn’t dumb. Not in certain fields of expertise, at any rate. I’m only arguing that the “ha ha, he’s a moron!” reactions here are not particularly plausible.
Thank god someone is here to stand up for the richest asshole on earth.
Musk is an asshole. I’m standing up for accuracy.
Whoa, be careful everyone, these are the slick moves of a master genius!
It’s entirely possible that he was smart, I’m sure he was to an extent, but I believe that Space X and Tesla have better structures in places for managing/limiting Musk’s direct influence, and I also believe that, like many of the super rich, he’s succumbed to a form of right-wing brain rot over the years. His brain is now smooth and toxic.
I literally said in the comment that you’re responding to that Musk isn’t good at running Twitter.
It’s a little worse than ‘not going well’, is my point.
That’s not my point. I said that Musk had done well with his other non-Twitter companies and you responded “but look at how terrible he is at running Twitter!”
Don’t forget this bit:
“It’s entirely possible that he was smart, I’m sure he was to an extent, but I believe that Space X and Tesla have better structures in places for managing/limiting Musk’s direct influence, and I also believe that, like many of the super rich, he’s succumbed to a form of right-wing brain rot over the years. His brain is now smooth and toxic.”
It’s far easier to be successful if you’re already rich.
He didn’t start off particularly wealthy.
Exactly! Who’s parents don’t have apartheid emerald mine money?!
Snopes article on the “emerald money” story. TLDR, “A story about Musk’s father once owning an emerald mine evolved into a larger rumor that had no evidence to support its central claim.”
Musk’s first company was Zip2, which he co-founded with two other people and $28,000 of seed capital from his father.
i mean, that’s still way more wealthy than most people. i don’t think i know anybody who had 28,000 buckaroos of money to burn on their child’s business venture. and the article that you linked does say that musk’s dad made around 400,000 dollars off the emerald mine, which is… still more wealth than most people will see in their lifetime. according to Errol, he sent money he made off the emerald mine and by selling his yacht to Elon and Kimbal to pay for living expenses while they were studying in the US.
It’s not easy to become a billionaire from 28,000 USD. Definitely not based on luck alone if you grow several businesses.
Most people don’t get seed money from their parents, but the median American will inherit $70K from their parents.
Regardless, most people who start a business can take out a loan. And to put things in perspective, even opening a fast food restaurant will require over $200K.
In other words, the advantage that $28K gave Musk was nowhere near enough to open a small restaurant, much less automatically turn him into a billionaire.
What other changes has a thought process behind them? Virtually everything he’s done at twitter has seemed like something that occurred to him while shitting and then he forced his team to implement by the end of the day.
Twitter was apparently losing a lot of money before he bought it, so laying off a bunch of staff is one reasonable way to deal with that. Same with charging for the API, getting rid of data centers and offices, and even login requirements to reduce bandwidth and infrastructure costs.
These were all things done as an attempt at solving problems. They may not have been good solutions, but as I said, you can understand the thought process behind them. “We’re spending more than we take in. So do things to reduce spending and boost income.”
I have no idea what problem this rebranding is supposed to solve, though. When Facebook changed to Meta, or Google changed to Alphabet, I could understand those because their name had become associated with only a very specific subset of what the company wanted to do. Twitter is still just being Twitter, though. Unless perhaps he’s got some big new project he’s planning for them to start doing that’s distinct from microblogging.
The decision probably involved a big line of cocaine
Or two overlapping lines of cocaine!
Wow get this genius some venture capital funding