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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/24/elon-musk-twitter-meltdown-tesla/
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/24/elon-musk-twitter-meltdown-tesla/
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 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.
@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 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
@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.
@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.
@faizsays holy cats.
@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.