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Faiz Siddiqui

NEW: Elon Musk sent a Signal message ordering his staff to aid in the Twitter Files: "please give Bari [Weiss] full access to everything at Twitter. No limits at all.”

That triggered a frenzy inside Twitter, which was under a decade-old FTC order. IT staff refused to onboard Weiss, worried Twitter would be breaking the law.

Days later, two executives were fired.

"These guys did amazing damage,” a former employee told me of the Musk subordinates running the company.

washingtonpost.com/technology/

The Washington PostTwitter brings Elon Musk’s genius reputation crashing down to earthBy Faiz Siddiqui

Inside Twitter, Musk occupies a 10th-floor conference room with a staging area. There, guests wait for the Twitter CEO — sometimes for more than an hour — before being called in.

Meeting guests are instructed not to speak until Musk does.

washingtonpost.com/technology/

The Washington PostTwitter brings Elon Musk’s genius reputation crashing down to earthBy Faiz Siddiqui

Musk made Tesla the world's most valuable automaker and SpaceX the most succesful private spaceflight company in history

But inside Twitter, it wasn't always clear that Musk grasped the issues the social media company was dealing with

@faizsays They’re a step away from being told not to look directly at His Eminence.

@faizsays Nice! I'm glad someone in the media is finally questioning his unquestioned reputation for genius.

I don't think he's a genius at all.

I think he's a bullshit artist. That's his genius.

@oliphant @faizsays I really don’t like him, but if he is not a genius with what he has accomplished with Tesla and Space X, then there must me genius somewhere around him.

@Franguy @faizsays Reading up on stories about Tesla and SpaceX, there are entire teams and individuals who exist to manage his ego and keep him away from touching anything really important.

None of that had an opportunity to exist at Twitter before he slashed the workforce.

@Franguy @oliphant @faizsays how is that hard to believe? To put it in film terms, Musk is a producer. He has money. The people who produced, say, Brazil, might have had some input on the product (they did), but that input might have been stupid (it was) and the people actually creating might have made something genius anyway (Gilliam did). Musk inherited money and invested it in other people's ideas and talent -- then took full credit for them

@Xzackly @Franguy @oliphant @faizsays
I like this analogy a lot. To quibble just a little bit, maybe Elmo is an executive producer (purely a source of money) who has no idea to how to run a film project, or actually create the finished product. /1

@Xzackly @Franguy @oliphant
@faizsays
And “Brazil” sounds like just the right kind of picture, a brilliant artistic achievement that was a struggle and a mess the entire time, where, in the end, the investors had no appreciation of what had been accomplished. /end.

@Xzackly @Franguy @oliphant @faizsays Nice example, since the actual traveling circus surrounding MuskmElon himself at these companies is reminiscent of the bureaucracy portrayed there... and now I'm imagining Elmo in Katherine Helmond's role, getting fitted for an upgrade for his hairplugs and chinplant.

@Franguy @oliphant @faizsays I can't stand him now but I was a fan years ago. I loved the idea of what SpaceX/Tesla sought to accomplish. I heard his talks, and he clearly had some aptitude for engineering and a deep technical knowledge.

He's also ambitious, conceited, and ruthless, which served him well building up those companies, but backfired badly at Twitter. And he's an utter buffoon about social issues and just getting along with humans

@hipquark @Franguy @faizsays He also knows absolutely nothing about software engineering.

Which is different from actual engineering.

@oliphant Yeah you could see the disaster coming to Twitter just from out of his depth he clearly is with the self driving car stuff. He just doesn't understand the complexity of software.

It reminds me a lot of hardware engineers I have sometimes been around who view software as a trivial problem because they understand hardware and software is just trivial stuff on top.

(Not saying Musk is a good engineer of any type, in fact those people generally weren't that great.)

@hackbod That's why I want to qualify it. I've never worked in actual engineering, just software engineering, and while there are parallels, they aren't the same thing.

Since I don't know a lot about engineering, I'm willing to grant him some kind of knowledge there, since I'm not knowledgeable enough about the topic.

Software engineering, on the other hand...

When you know, you can tell when someone is faking it.

@oliphant Yeah totally agree, I have no idea about his engineering abilities, but he is clearly not a software engineer. Two things that apply to self driving and even more Twitter:

(1) Complex systems where there is no right answer, just a set of difficult trade-offs involving subtle decisions and ability to view from different perspectives.

(2) Involving significant elements of social engineering, where how systems interact with people is critical to how you design them.

@oliphant @hackbod Yeah, one of the better parts of the job is that no one can really fake it for long.

@Franguy @oliphant @faizsays
He failed up and out, mostly out.
He's a mine owner son. He coded an utter useless, non-working online payment system, bought a company for its name with an X in the payment field, attracted investors and those investors and coder of the bought company bailed him out. They merged with another company with the better system, renamed it payPal because the name with X sounded like a porn site, and he was golden-parachuted/forced out to save the company from disaster.

@Franguy @oliphant @faizsays That was his first several millions with which he among others venture capitalized the EV-Company and used his money to squeeze out the original engineers and inventors, and it was downhill from there as far as improvements on the car goes. His contribution was a proprietary plug to monopolize the market at a time when the plug thing was a thing for several years, so much so that the EU had to write a law to stop the misuse.

@Franguy @oliphant @faizsays Teslas biggest revenue stream is Carbon vouchers, the climate protection scam to sell more fossil fuel when the climate crisis is already showing its ugly face.

His other companies are not much better, mostly they are either stupid, not viable long term or simply fantasy science fiction with a small core of the original goal of the company which however is way behind competitors.

Look up Musk debunked and Musk busted on youTube. Those amateur journos have receipts.

@oliphant
One that was born into money, willing to steal ideas, or buy his way into companies that were clearly about to hit the jackpot.

@oliphant @faizsays he is good at it. Good enough to convince the world that he should be the richest

@faizsays *private meaning billions in taxpayer funds via federal contracts.

@faizsays that's exactly what any semi-competent salesman would do - project confidence and full control, then scurry over to the engineers to find out if it can be done. Basic stuff.

@faizsays It is obvious now that in order to become a billionaire these days you need to be a sociopath.

@politicalpunk @faizsays Wealth hoarding, like any hoarding, is a mental illness and yet capitalism rewards and celebrates it.

@angiebaby @politicalpunk @faizsays Wealth hoarding is but a small part of the problem. We, as a society, need to stop worshiping idols.

@hu_logic @angiebaby @faizsays Exactly. I only admire never worship, and even that can be fraught with downsides.

@politicalpunk @faizsays it's absurd that society lets anyone become a billionnaire. Given that money is largely numbers in computers, kind of like scores in a computer game with rules that we all agree to live by. Societies can choose any rules they want, yet we consistently choose rules in the game that is life that allows people to accumulate really large numbers.

@wtfrank @faizsays I 💯 agree! If I had that wealth I would feel so guilty day in and day out.

@wtfrank @politicalpunk @faizsays the key has been tax reduction. The top marginal rate is half what it was 50 years ago ! The super rich got control of a political party and made that job one. They are going to cancel democracy before it swings the other way.

@semiquaver @politicalpunk @faizsays And these dark-funded "think tanks" that drag the public policy debate in a direction that optimises for the wealthy rather than the public at large.

@semiquaver @wtfrank @politicalpunk @faizsays that's if it CAN swing the other way...either the rich would have to allow the swing, or there would be revolutions and guillotines before the society could reach such s point.

@politicalpunk @faizsays i would even say that being a sociopath is the only way to accumulating that much wealth.

@politicalpunk @faizsays Most billionaires made that money through exploitation: exploiting loopholes in laws & regulations, exploiting labor, or exploiting the environment. All for the goal of self enrichment. They then showily give .001% of that wealth to address the results of that exploitation as “charity”, thus allowing them to write it off their taxes.

@vaweisman @politicalpunk @faizsays a lot of Tesla's profit is from government contracts iirc

@lesblazemore Telsa was built as a way to gobble up government penalties on other manufacturers who failed to meet EV targets over the past decade. The automakers basically paid to prop up Tesla's operating costs, while Musk's cult of toxic tech bros poured their speculation into the stock, pumping it to unsupported nosebleed valuations--early investors took their money and ran, the rest are classic bag-holders now.

@vaweisman @politicalpunk @faizsays

@reneestephen @vaweisman @politicalpunk @faizsays
def bagholders, the only question is when that bubble will burst, and I guess the answer is pretty much right now

@lesblazemore A perfect storm: those subsidies are coming to an end as other automakers ramp up global production, and Tesla was barely becoming profitable as it was; Musk will have to keep selling off chunks to fund his ego-landslide, but hasn't given up control, and even the bros are losing confidence and starting to panic-sell.

@vaweisman @politicalpunk @faizsays

@vaweisman @politicalpunk @faizsays most? Pretty much all billionaires, and even quite a few lower level capitalists. Capitalism, at its root, is exploitation to extract value from other people's labor for the capitalist class.

@politicalpunk @faizsays to be honest, that has always been the quickest way to riches. CEOs and politicians both have much higher rates of sociopathy than almost all other occupations, because the whole job, in both cases, is manipulating other people.

@politicalpunk @faizsays Brains was never the prerequisite for success in business. It was always a mixture of being fearless and utterly ruthless.

@faizsays
The classic weakness of autocrats.
They surround themselves with lickspittles who tell them what they want to hear.
Based on that, they make self destructive decisions.
#musk #xi #putin

@faizsays
Not much of a genius. Rather, an insecure, small man with a well-justified imposter syndrome who uses his money and power as a cudgel. Pathetic.

@faizsays So Space Karen likes to keep people waiting as a dominance move? Just like Putin.

@jobsboils @faizsays lol...next he'll be using that same, really long table for meetings, er I mean audiences.