I don't know man. His last pure software company was PayPal and they fired his ass from the CEO role and put in a competent CEO (Peter Theil) to right the ship and sell it off before the 01 crash.
Tesla and SpaceX have been wildly successful and he will forever recieve some well deserved credit for their successes but at the same time I think its pretty bad that Tesla (and SpaceX) have had multiple near death experiences and some them could have been avoided if it weren't for incompetence.
I followed the Model 3 production religiously and the amount of dumb mistakes they made even after other industry experts were yelling at them about imminent iceberg collision is just unbelievable. In fact the Model 3 production, with its horribly designed body that he wasn't keeping on top of and Musk's stupid attempts to automate all of assembly should be entirely attributed to him. It was so bad it was worse than even the shortseller's worst predictions.
I guess you can give him a pass for near bankruptcy #1(Roadster roll out) and #4(COVID lockdowns). Not sure about #2(Model S early sales woes and potential acquisition by Google)
All I am saying is that he fucks up A LOT and has thus far managed to stave off the consequences of his decisions but many occurrences have been down to luck and luck is something you should never bet on.
The US has been formed religiously by various congregations that descend from Calvinism, which teaches that hard work earns you the grace of God. In modern times, this has morphed into Prosperity Gospel which teaches that if you are loved by God, you will become materially successful, as well as the flipside; if you are materially successful, you must therefore be loved by God.
The billionaire worship is simply the secular version of this faith. X made billions of dollars by owning a business that does Y, therefore X must be an expert on Y, and businesses in general, and is a genius, and is a morally superior person. Otherwise X wouldn't be a billionaire, because - horror of all horrors - the world is just, isn't it? It couldn't be the case that X just got lucky, can it? Surely, X has earned their billions, right?
You’re still fixating on the wealth part, which people on this site (at least the arguments I see upvoted) do not.
People are “worshipping” Musk because of his repeated success in making successful large innovative businesses. The wealth he has is a product of that, but the deference is to the success of the companies.
Any optimization he might do is unlikely to offset the cost of servicing the debt he offloaded to Twitter's balance sheet after the acquisition.
So at 5% interest the yearly cost is 650 million, even at some obscene and unrealistic payroll per employee (including not only developers), like let's say 400k he'd have to fire over 1600 people just to balance this out. There is no way to spin this positively. Also due to no more RSUs cash comp for remaining employee would need to increase.
Add to that the the loss in advertisement revenue do to obvious reasons.
Taking these facts into account could you please explain how is Musk NOT a liability to Twitter? He basically spent 31 billion (plus 13 billion he offload to Twitter) just to buy the trademark and the user base (and some proportion of advertisers...). From a financial standpoint that's an objectively terrible deal. Musk might have other goals and that's great but in no way this is comparable to Tesla or SpaceX.
>But he did change the world with his companies already, didn't he?
History is full of examples of extraordinary successful people who get blinded by their own success and start thinking that they are infallible. This ussually results which in pretty unhinged behavior when they get older. Musk does not seem like the most grounded person ever so he's likely at a much higher risk of this than almost every tech billionaire I can think of.
also: History is full of examples of extraordinary successful people [period].
Maybe somebody with Musk track record can be seen as more credible than some random "qwytw" on the internet? I mean incentives are on his side, aren't they?
For one his famous. It's his toy, so he won't let it disappear into irrelevance without fighting for it. There are not many people currently alive with comparable track record, being recognized world wide, with deep pockets like him.
What if in few years time from now people will be stepping on each other writing posts and books on how they really knew all of that from the beginning, that obviously he was right etc. - doesn't sound unreal or alien to me, quite opposite actually.
To be honest, I don't even think anything extraordinary needs to happen for all of it to work out just fine.
For all people saying technically it's not just rendering short messages - well it is just that at the end.
Look at stackoverflow - most people don't realize it's just single monolith application running on 6 servers - all of it.
There are still thousands of people employed there, which feels like too many if anything.
Did I misrepresent any facts or figures? Did I lie? What does credibility have anything to do with anything otherwise? It's an objectively bad deal from a financial perspective, if you have any arguments against that you're free to share them.
Twitter might do "fine" as a platform. Sure, why not... Does not change the fact that he grossly overpaid and that the 13 billion in additional debt will be financially crippling for the company. He might sell some more Tesla stock to offset that. I mean it's his money, he can do whatever he wants (unless the SEC stops being a complete joke).
> that obviously he was right etc. - doesn't sound unreal or alien to me, quite opposite actually.
Right about what? Even Zuckerberg seems to have a clearer vision about the Metaverse than Musk seems to have about the future of Twitter. I might be wrong. Care to enlighten me instead of talking about some random tangentially related things?
> There are still thousands of people employed there, which feels like too many if anything.
Sure, can't really disagree. However is it better for a business to have an additional 2000 employees or so who are possibly superfluous or to fire all of them and spend ~600 million or thereabouts servicing a debt incurred for no reason? It's a pretty straightforward you chose to ignore for some reason.
And that makes him infallible? If anyone else but Musk bought Twitter and started doing what he did they'd be the laughing stock of the financial world. His reputation is the only thing keeping him afloat (in this specific case, he might still do great with SpaceX and Tesla but so what? People like Jobs, Buffet, Gates etc. also made significant blunders at some points in their career)
To play devil's advocate for a bit, are you certain he's solely responsible for the successes of SpaceX/Tesla, or that those companies succeeded in spite of his leadership?
In case it isn't clear, I agree with the parent comment. In the same tone as the comment above the parent, you could also write "Thing is - Elon Musk knows a thing or two about sexual harassment lawsuits. It's inevitable that he will have another at Twitter."
Stop idolizing billionaires.
>Musk has successfully run companies in the past and is running two extremely successful companies right now.
Is he actually running those companies, or is he posting selfies of whiteboards at 1:30am showing architecture diagrams of Twitter?
In these markets, after he was nearly forced by courts into completing a purchase deal for Twitter after making an overpriced offer, I'm genuinely curious to see how he pays the ~$1b in interest per year on the debt to purchase Twitter.
No, people are idolizing Musk because he is a billionaire.
People who obviously know absolutely fucking nothing about coding or manufacturing or running businesses or software engineering or cars or space or rockets or emerald mines are continuously defending Musk, and their only justification is that "he's rich, so he's obviously smarter than you!"
> No, people are idolizing Musk because he is a billionaire.
No they are not. They are idolizing him specifically because of the success of Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal.
> "he's rich, so he's obviously smarter than you!"
Nobody is making that argument. Its usually, “look at the success of the companies he leads”.
You can make an argument about whether or not he should get the credit he does for the success, but nobody is idolizing the wealth.
None of these people are going to defend the great insight of the winner of the last powerball because there is no repeated pattern of long term success.
Look at his claim that Twitter is slow in India because of poorly batched backend calls [1].
He's simply regurgitating what he thinks he heard from others without really understanding how anything works. He knows less about software architecture than an intern picked at random.
Stop repeating this, because Elon had the gist of it correct, if not the specifics.
a) Twitter is atrociously slow for something that displays a mere kilobyte of text at a time.
b) Much of that is because of hundreds of client-server JavaScript requests on first load. Not technically RPCs, but just as slow and looking nearly identical on the network.
c) Most of the rest is because of a thousand microservices chatting away at each other. Not technically client-to-server, but still taking significant time.
Elon accidentally conflated the network path of (b) with the performance issues caused by (c).
They're both bad! They both need fixing! The fact that Musk mixed up doesn't matter.
> Much of that is because of hundreds of client-server JavaScript requests on first load.
Isn't this not true though? Based on the responses to his Tweet only one GraphQL request is made which batches the whole thing.
> Most of the rest is because of a thousand microservices chatting away at each other. Not technically client-to-server, but still taking significant time.
But what does this have to do with India? If the slowness is due to calls between microservices hosted on (from my understanding) their own hardware, why would it matter if the initial GraphQL request comes in from India, since all the rest of the backend requests would be the same?
> his Tweet only one GraphQL request is made which batches the whole thing.
Literally bang in the middle of an F12 network trace showing dozens of requests, mostly JavaScript. Not JSON RPC, per se, but still an overhead taking up seconds, especially on low-end Android devices.
> But what does this have to do with India?
Everything. Nitter uses 40KB of code & data to display the same content that takes Twitter megabytes.
People in subsequent threads have pointed to the gigabytes of "data" usage by the Twitter Android app, which is just absurd for an app that displays primarily text.
It's a bloated pig of an app that performs poorly on 5G networks in the United States, and hence terribly on slow and overloaded networks separated from Twitter's data centres by an ocean.
"It works fine for me" says the engineer connected to the WiFi in Twitter HQ.
> Literally bang in the middle of an F12 network trace showing dozens of requests, mostly JavaScript. Not JSON RPC, per se, but still an overhead taking up seconds, especially on low-end Android devices.
I'm pretty sure that's my point? How are you equating "dozens" to "1200" (or even "hundreds" in your last comment) as though Elon is in the right ballpark?
As for the rest, I don't know what your point is, where did Elon say anything in that thread about how much data they were sending? He's quite literally responding to someone saying it was the amount of JavaScript being downloaded and telling them they're wrong, it's the "1200 RPC calls". I'm pretty sure the point he was attempting to make is that it's slow due to thousands of serial "RPC" calls made between the app and Twitter (which will have a higher RRT to India) but as you've demonstrated that's not what it's doing.
I'm not saying Twitter is well designed, I'm just not pretending like Elon somehow had the right idea when you've had to stretch it this far. If he had a proper technical understanding then we wouldn't have to have such a discussion of what he "actually meant".
That's correct, I am working in mobile world since 2005 and the latency of mobile networks is the most bad thing when you build mobile apps. The more requests you do the more latency you introduce to the user, especially if it's fetching data for UI, even if you do it asynchronously you have to wait for the data to update the UI.
> Much of that is because of hundreds of client-server JavaScript requests on first load. Not technically RPCs, but just as slow and looking nearly identical on the network.
This is not true at all. I have a look and it's not that there are many REST requests it's that the requests send back a load of data. For Example the timeline sends back a 1MB JSON response. It's heavily gzipped so comes in at 100KB over the network but it takes quite a while for the whole request.
In places like india the internet is slow and many people are using VPNs. I emulated this and I can see that over VPN on a slow internet connection it's like 10 seconds to load the home page.
He was right on the details of the two different issues, because those were explained to him.
But he conflated two things that he didn't really understand and reached a completely wrong conclusion. He's shared that conclusion with confidence and never admitted he was wrong. That's a fatal flaw for someone who holds a Chief Engineer title at a rocket company.
He's a CEO who is has been incredibly successful at selling a vision and getting people to do what he wants. He is not an engineer. He should stop role playing as one.
He also doesn't make decisions like this from monologues in his head - he surrounds himself with people having deep expertise and makes bold decisions based on feedback; if something doesn't make sense, they'll stop doing it the next morning. In "normal" corp not only it'll be there 3 years from now, it'll also grow fat around it and spawn other idiotic initiatives with little to no (negative?) value.
SpaceX is subsidised (and so is Tesla) and automotive industry was already in the process of electrifying. Tesla just put pressure to speed it up. Haven't checked but it would not surprises me if Formula E predated Tesla.
Winning government contracts over other competitors is not the same thing as “subsidized”. Otherwise Hilton is subsidized because government employees stay there sometimes.
I get the impression that some government contracts are used as stealth subsidies. And SpaceX, Tesla, and Starlink have benefited from plenty of actual subsidies, too.
To be clear, I'm not implying that's a bad thing. These companies seem like an example of subsidies working as intended, i.e. driving innovation.
Can you give specific examples? Diluting the meaning down to “the government is also one of this company’s customers” just makes it meaningless. That will cover nearly every large company.
In January 2020, Toyota passed the milestone of more than 15 million self-charging hybrid vehicles
If every vehicle sold by Tesla since its inception up to the most recent Tesla sales figures released for Q1 of 2022 are accounted for, there are over 2,645,000 Teslas on the road worldwide
Sure, cheap hybrids. Nobody is buying them because it's their dream car though, it is just affordable and cheap to run. Tesla makes cars that are desirable.
Funny enough it would be hard to find anyone with more CEO experience than Musk. This doesn't mean he does all the management, often the work of these guys is to find the right people to do the management for them.
Yeah he is so smart, he locked himself out in firing spree during some manic phase and then had to beg people he just fired to let him in. If anything, this twitter saga showed serious cracks (that were there before if you looked closely) in his persona. Vengeful, petty childish behavior was there before (ie Musk accusing main Thai cave rescuer for being a pedophile, because he refused his submarine concept? Plenty of similar stories)
Its a matter of approach - if you focus on all his success, you can continue worshiping him as some capitalist messiah. If you focus on bad stuff, he is a fucked up mess to be polite, a bad parent and husband, an even worse human being in general, utterly horrible boss, person with deep mental issues that aren't clearly tackled in appropriate ways.
The truth, somewhere in the middle of those 2 extremes, still ain't that nice IMHO. He burned basically all good PR capital be built over the years, basically nobody sees him now as good person, just another ultra rich a-hole like Bezos that needs to be kept in check. As he will find in following years, people's opinions trickle down to cash flow. If I would be buying an electric car right now (which doesn't make much sense for another decade to me), Tesla would be off the table for example.
Literally his first two companies, Zip2 (CTO) and x.com (CEO), were pure software companies?
Another company he founded, SpaceX, is the first space launch provider to ever achieve propulsive landing and re-use of an orbital-class rocket, a feat which includes some of the hardest software engineering you can do.
Another company he runs, Tesla, is famous for being one of the few car companies that makes software for their cars that people actually want to use.
If a citation is needed, it is a citation to explain how anyone could possibly believe with that track record that Elon Musk doesn't know how software is built.
Knowing how to run a software company and knowing how to build software are two things. The first thing usually implies hiring the right people for the second thing. I’m sure Musk knows at least a bit of that, but everything we see with Twitter is that he’s axing those people at a rate that you can’t keep up hiring at. So there is some obvious disconnect here and I don’t think “Ah, he knows what he is doing “ is a sufficient explanation.
The Zip2 application ran on a single PC. Technology has changed a lot from the early Java days(I think what Zip2 was written in). Perhaps this helps explain some of his public mistakes in understanding the codebase of Twitter.
> SpaceX, is the first space launch provider to ever achieve propulsive landing and re-use of an orbital-class rocket, a feat which includes some of the hardest software engineering you can do.
Not to be dismissive of landing an orbital rocket, but that's mostly a feat of aerospace engineering and control theory. On the software engineering side of things for SpaceX I think their work around CFD would be the more impressive feat from a computer science perspective.
Elon just made sweeping changes that cratered their ad revenue and took an axe to engineering teams all over the company. He did this in the lead up to the holiday season which has been the most profitable part of the year with advertisers pouring a significant portion of their yearly ad budgets into ad buys. Even if he was 100% correct that all of this was bloat, it was a monumentally stupid idea to make these changes now of all times. I would have expected him to at least have enough of an understanding of software engineering to know that deprecating systems and cutting out bloat needs to happen carefully with the talent onhand to be able to back out changes and manage the transition seamlessly. Fundamentally the risks involved are more financially impactful than the price of keeping headcount around for another year to do it safely.
Twitter hasn't even had a major incident yet and just the revenue loss from advertisers pausing ad campaigns probably already offsets all the savings they were hoping for in 4 - 6 months once the layoffs finally start bringing down staff costs.
Look, I actually do agree that Gwynne Shotwell has been a key component in making SpaceX successful / curbing Musk's worst impulses / etc.
But don't you think it's strange that (assuming so much of SpaceX's success is owed to Shotwell) nothing like what SpaceX has achieved was achieved at her previous gigs? But then she goes to work for Elon Musk and suddenly...
Regardless, the point I'm making is not "Elon Musk wrote all the software at his various companies himself" but rather "Elon Musk founding / running / exiting a variety of companies in very diverse fields but all of which are good at software is a very strong indicator that he understands software and how it is built".
Meanwhile, the "he doesn't understand software" corpus of evidence basically amounts to "I think he's doing a bad job of running Twitter in the handful of weeks he has been there. I think this even though I have very limited insight into what is actually happening at Twitter, besides what is being fed to the media by disgruntled employees who probably hated Elon Musk before the acquisition and their subsequent firing".
