The ongoing Elon Twitter saga: "insert demographic" melts down

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Mobster
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No, the BBC did, because they were so embarrassed that billionaire space man bossed them so hard in an interview, in fact they were so upset they took it out on Instagram too just to be sure

Absolute nonsense.

Those warnings have been on the BBC website for years, I was part of the team that implemented it. Drivel.
 
Caporegime
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He's an idiot, he has got to where he has through absolutely no talent or intelligence of his own. That is now obvious. Short Tesla.

I don't think that's true. I think he has quite a bit of ability, and that served him well in the past. What we're seeing is what happens when someone's ego wildly outgrows their actual ability and they buy into their own myths. Perhaps because they don't have anyone around them who is able to point out when the emperor is naked.
 
Caporegime
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I don't think that's true. I think he has quite a bit of ability, and that served him well in the past. What we're seeing is what happens when someone's ego wildly outgrows their actual ability and they buy into their own myths. Perhaps because they don't have anyone around them who is able to point out when the emperor is naked.


Indeed, he isn't stupid, and he has certain talents to sell his vision and motivate people to either work extremely hard for him, or invest, But he is no genius and his knowledge and abilities have a limited domain. He knows abslutely zero about social media and the difficulties in managing different constraints form advertisers, users base of different political persuasions, government oversight, international regulators.

He is way out of his depth, doesn't understand anything about the industry he paid 44bn fr something worth a quarter of that, yet his ego is refusing to let actual experts try and make a sucess of Twitter.

A few months back I read an in-depth article of ex-twitter employee who was fairly senior in Twitter strategy. His views were fairly balanced, not overtly bashing Musk and critcial of Twitter. He admitted that Twitter had a very difficult business case. Although popular it wasn't as big as the big boys in social media, it was barely profitable, costs were high and it was difficult to bring on more advertisers or get more user engagement. But Twitter had spent years and hundreds of millions on researching and testing options, saying massive sums to external strategy think-tanks and research groups. All of Musks initial ideas they had brainstormed, tested, ran simulations, A/B tests, focus groups, expert analysis. All of Musks's ideas were reject very early on for basic reasons. Some of the better ideas went to proudction with limited A/B testing to measure imact. but were found lacking. They found they could only ever make marginal improvements in profitability..

Twitter wont be easy for anyone to make a wild success out of, but certainly everything `musk is doing is counterproductive at best and can be easily analysed and prredicted to fail before further degrading the value of the company
 
Mobster
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I don't think that's true. I think he has quite a bit of ability, and that served him well in the past. What we're seeing is what happens when someone's ego wildly outgrows their actual ability and they buy into their own myths. Perhaps because they don't have anyone around them who is able to point out when the emperor is naked.

Staggering you can still believe this. Any of his success has been with others helping him, now they've abandoned him you see the results. He is a total liability.
 
Man of Honour
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Staggering you can still believe this. Any of his success has been with others helping him, now they've abandoned him you see the results. He is a total liability.

Elon tends to lean towards if you gather up enough experts and have them work the problem long enough someone will crack it.

I don't know if there was a defining moment but in the last few years he seems to have abandoned many of his principles and perspective on the world and acting quite child like in many ways, maybe too many drugs :s
 
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Staggering you can still believe this. Any of his success has been with others helping him, now they've abandoned him you see the results. He is a total liability.

Musk has played an important role in too many companies that are significant on the world stage for that to be blind luck: PayPal, Tesla, Space X, and OpenAI all succeeded with him, as well as others. His fans would have you believe that this is because he is a generational genius, and now he's making a fool of himself at Twitter many would have you believe it is because he was a talentless idiot all along. The truth is that neither views are correct. He has valuable skills that have served him well in the past, but like everyone else he also has weaknesses and limitations - no-one is good at everything. His hubris has brought him low at Twitter, and now he's too rich and his ego has become too bloated for him to listen to people around him, the ugly side of his personality is on full display in his behaviour on social media and elsewhere.
 
Man of Honour
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His fans would have you believe that this is because he is a generational genius, and now he's making a fool of himself at Twitter many would have you believe it is because he was a talentless idiot all along.

I think a lot of it is perspective rather than genius. Elon tends to see the world a bit differently to most people and like myself his skill set tends to be broader but not necessarily deep while most people tend to be narrower but more deeply experienced/specialised. So he can bring things together from diverse disciplines to make breakthroughs other people might not.
 
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Mobster
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Musk has played an important role in too many companies that are significant on the world stage for that to be blind luck: PayPal, Tesla, Space X, and OpenAI all succeeded with him, as well as others. His fans would have you believe that this is because he is a generational genius, and now he's making a fool of himself at Twitter many would have you believe it is because he was a talentless idiot all along. The truth is that neither views are correct. He has valuable skills that have served him well in the past, but like everyone else he also has weaknesses and limitations - no-one is good at everything. His hubris has brought him low at Twitter, and now he's too rich and his ego has become too bloated for him to listen to people around him, the ugly side of his personality is on full display in his behaviour on social media and elsewhere.

WITH him, yes. On his own, absolutely not.
 
Mobster
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I don't think anyone thinks Musk built these things single-handedly :confused:

My point is that the achievements you point to are mainly because of other people. He was there, yes - but it was not him that did it.

You see this with Tesla, the success was mainly not down to him. As soon as he makes his own calls the company goes down the can - and will almost now be overtaken by GM/VW.
 
Caporegime
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Staggering you can still believe this. Any of his success has been with others helping him, now they've abandoned him you see the results. He is a total liability.

Musk had influence, but it wasn't direct input into strategy or engineering. He had a vision, he was determined, he can motivate people, he could probably help foster good strategic thinking and innovation.


Above all he could use his wealth to buy the best people and finance the companies, and when he left the experts to guide the process with just a touch of inspirational talks, out-of-box innovation etc then he could realize success. .


The problem with Twitter is he isn't doing that. He has fallen for some weird far-right BS and thrown out his previous modus-operendi. He is trying to make strategic choices without letting the experts guide him
 
Mobster
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Musk had influence, but it wasn't direct input into strategy or engineering. He had a vision, he was determined, he can motivate people, he could probably help foster good strategic thinking and innovation.


Above all he could use his wealth to buy the best people and finance the companies, and when he left the experts to guide the process with just a touch of inspirational talks, out-of-box innovation etc then he could realize success. .


The problem with Twitter is he isn't doing that. He has fallen for some weird far-right BS and thrown out his previous modus-operendi. He is trying to make strategic choices without letting the experts guide him

Alright I can concede to that, good post.
 
Soldato
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Musk can motivate people - he fired most of the T-team , s/w teams in Tesla too.

UblockO solution for twitter embeds, something more discriminating would be nice, to firstly, remove Musk's musings
! 2023-07-02 https://forums.overclockers.co.uk
||platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html$subdocument
a lot of the twitter stuff is scraped itself - how long before all those authors demand renumeration for their copyright.
 
Soldato
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I don't think that's true. I think he has quite a bit of ability, and that served him well in the past. What we're seeing is what happens when someone's ego wildly outgrows their actual ability and they buy into their own myths. Perhaps because they don't have anyone around them who is able to point out when the emperor is naked.

You realise Twitter is more popular than it has ever been? What is it you think you're seeing now?
 
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