Is Elon Beyond Reproach?

One user responded basically asking is Twitter a tech company which is a totally fair question, I would propose that there&#x27;s at least a decent chance that running Twitter solely like a tech company will lead to... challenges.<p>And second, he seems to really hate this idea that founders are criticized by the plebes (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;1591098388317179908" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitter.net&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;1591098388317179908</a>) . I get his overall thesis, that we should be constructive and optimistic for a better future and stop tearing people down, but is it so crazy to humanize the employees of companies, and not just their founders? Is it so crazy to want a better world where founders treat their employees with autonomy and respect, and criticize those who don&#x27;t?<p>Also criticism can be a form of education, is it so wrong to think that Musk has something to learn here? I can’t imagine he wouldn’t think so, watching his interactions on Twitter, I think he’s even benefiting from the criticism!<p>Having been on the side of trying to do something unpopular, the worst kind of feedback you can get is no feedback at all.

&gt; <i>In both those companies, people die if the software doesn&#x27;t work right.</i><p>Indeed: many people have been killed by Teslas running the half-baked Autopilot, and Teslas have a far worse safety profile than other new cars in their category.

Is the difficulty of running a company proportional to the technical difficulty of the problems it attempts to solve? I believe there&#x27;s a lot more to running a company than finding a solution to a technical problem without killing anyone in the process.<p>I think it&#x27;s fair to assume that Paul Graham, who runs a startup incubator, already knows that it takes more than that to run a company successfully. So what&#x27;s the point of broadcasting this simplistic, condescending viewpoint to his followers?<p>If I was one, I would feel that he&#x27;s looking down on me. &quot;We smart, you dumb. We do thing good, so we also do other thing good. Shut up and clap for creator.&quot;

If I buy this logic, and I also have eyes and can see how Elon is running Twitter, what should that tell me about his ability to competently run Tesla and SpaceX?

What I think Elon is missing out on is he has the perspective of the end user of twitter and perceives all the problems from that viewpoint and appears to be making changes to better the end user experience. The reality of how twitter functions might be that the end user experience is the tip of the iceberg and all the rest of the iceberg that supports the tip has nothing to do with end users and is more focused on content moderation&#x2F;advertising (which are the actual products of twitter) and scaling of that system, abstraction layers to make scaling feasible, etc.<p>None of his other companies have the scale and variability that an always online global social media company brings. In software they are likely an entirely unique set of problems that only a few companies have built solutions around (which many software people like to think they need those solutions but I digress.) Those solutions are widely talked about in software circles which is why quite a few people are commenting about how Elon&#x27;s comments are flat out wrong. Software folks that may not work on these systems at least understand how these things should work, what micro-services are, why they are used, why they might be a bad choice, what GraphQL is, etc. There are far, far fewer people that understand the internals of EV tech and far fewer for rocketry. What he is facing is a huge number of people that can read one of his tweets and know that the tweet doesn&#x27;t pass the smell test for BS.

While all of the mentioned companies are tech companies they also encompass other considerations. Many of the challenges that a company like Twitter faces are not purely technical. Twitter is in many ways like a media company and is also a large and very varied community.<p>Both of these facts present very different challenges to manufacturing and developing software used in very different circumstances. There are some obvious cases in point here: the pricing for Twitter Blue net of App Store&#x2F;Play Store fees doesn&#x27;t make sense as a replacement for lost revenue from advertising. Having a comprehensive understand of, for example, supply chain management for manufacturing cars doesn&#x27;t necessarily provide any direct benefits here.<p>Regardless of how one might feel about Musks&#x27;s decisions at Twitter it strikes me overly reductive to say that Tesla and SpaceX are both tech companies therefore his decisions are good, even if they seem questionable to us poor imbeciles who haven&#x27;t been CEO of a tech company before.<p>If anything I take this is a grand illustration of the dangers inherent in playing at being a CEO when you don&#x27;t have to actually do it. It is very easy to sit at my desk and propose some strategic changes for Twitter that I think might legitimately be for the best in the long term, but it is another matter entirely to be in the position of putting those into practice and living with the consequences.

What I see with Elon at Twitter is classic attempt at disruption. This is often characterized by somewhat naively asking questions like “Why do we need to bother with x” or “Why can’t we just do y.” Invariably, some portion of the ideas and shortcuts are failures, revealing that “we have to do x because” or “we can’t just do y because.”<p>The question here is, can Elon find enough shortcuts and ideas that work and recover sufficiently from failures for the ones that don’t?<p>I think it’s still up in the air, but it does seem like a challenge with the current financial obligation. Elon understands the product a lot better than a lot of ‘classic’ CEOs might, but the kind of close calls Elon admits Tesla had won’t eternally be in his favor.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedriven.io&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;04&#x2F;elon-musk-tesla-almost-went-bankrupt-during-model-3-ramp&#x2F;amp&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedriven.io&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;04&#x2F;elon-musk-tesla-almost-went-...</a>

This tweeter should stick to essays about lisp, about which his opinions seem more intelligent.

It appears that there are certain people who believe that humans should strive to be compassionate and understanding and not publicly humiliate other people - and that there are certain other people who believe that this is all worth nothing as long as you&#x27;re a &quot;successful founder&quot;.<p>pg should really ask himself whether he wants to defend a person who is as morally bankrupt as Elon Musk.<p>I don&#x27;t feel like Elon is gonna be successful with his approach. But I worry even more about a world in which he <i>is</i> successful and this kind of asshole behaviour is normalised.<p>Somehow, a subset of tech culture has embraced the idea that as long as you&#x27;re technically brilliant (and&#x2F;or filthy rich), you get to play entirely by your own rules without any consideration for other people.

I don&#x27;t need to be a pilot to know something&#x27;s wrong when an airliner is careening towards the ground at a steep angle.

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It doesn&#x27;t seem like he&#x27;s been doing a great job so far. But hey, maybe he&#x27;s making the right decisions and no one really understand anything.<p>What even is the goal of a platform like twitter? Profitability? Something else?

Paul G looks like he reads too much Ayn Rand

Elon receives a disproportionate amount of hate. Nobody is perfect, but people seem to dwell on his mistakes, and ignore his.... gigantic successes. I&#x27;m not sure I would have given anyone with $8 a blue checkmark. But i&#x27;ve also never ran a company that put a rocket in space with astronauts on it. Elon is human, and Twitter was a failing business (it was losing Millions of dollars a day, that&#x27;s failing). Drastic transformation is necessary.

What Elon is doing right now with twitter is two-fold:<p>1) Getting rid of employees who are not a fit for a high-pressure, performance focused, environment, either by firing them directly or them voluntarily resigning due to stricter working conditions.<p>2) Iterating on the product to increase revenues.<p>1) results in massive cost savings and 2) increased revenues (with time).<p>This very much needed since twitter has been a commercial disaster for many years and is heading towards bankruptcy without drastic changes.