I have avoided jumping aboard the "Elon Musk is an idiot" train mainly because he is, plainly, not an idiot. Beyond that, it's obvious that he recognizes Twitter was a dumb, impulsive purchase. He's only running it because a court wouldn't let him wriggle out of it.
But counsel for the prosecution begs to disagree and offers Exhibit A: Twitter blue checks. What a wild-ass clusterfuck. Here's a brief, approximate timeline of the infamous blue check:
- In the early days of Twitter, shitposters and other assorted smart alecks started appropriating famous names for their accounts. George Clooney. Emperor of Japan. Donald Trump. Anyone who hadn't yet joined Twitter was fair game.
- The victims of this duplicity—movie stars, baseball players, news anchors—were forced to use made-up screen names when they joined up. For example, @realDonaldTrump. The imposters fought back. War ensued.
- Twitter, realizing it had a problem on its hands, created the blue check as a signal that an account was genuine. For example, Mother Jones procured blue checks for everyone on staff in 2010 so that readers would know for sure if a tweet came from a real MoJo reporter.
- Time passed. The origin of the blue check became shrouded in the mists of internet lore and people began to vaguely associate it with being some kind of VIP. Twitter had only itself to blame for this misconception since, in fact, it didn't hand out blue checks to just anybody who could prove their identity. They worked on the assumption that impersonation was only a problem for certain kinds of people, so they approved checks only for journalists, politicians, public figures, and a few assorted others.
- Time passed. Elon Musk bought Twitter.
- Musk appears to be one of the people who misconstrued the blue check as a mark of VIP status. He vowed to get rid of this elitist nonsense.
- After a bit of fumbling, Musk announced that the blue check would be available to anyone for $8 per month. This prompted widespread guffaws, but Musk stuck to his guns.
- Various smartasses started impersonating the famously thin-skinned Musk, who got pissed off and announced that impersonation will get you tossed off Twitter.
.
- The value of the old-school blue check—the one that merely verified you were who you said you were—suddenly became clear. Musk's answer was to give gray "Official" markings to anyone whose identity is verified by Twitter.
- But within a few hours of appearing, the gray marks were abruptly gone. There was no comment from Musk.
- And that brings us to the current day. Old blue checks still exist. Elon Musk has one! They are verifications of identity. New blue checks will exist someday for anyone willing to pony up $8. They are verifications to scam artists that you're a sucker. And then there will be the great unwashed masses, who presumably will get downgraded service or something and will have no idea why.
All clear now?
I'd be curious to hear you make the case that Musk is plainly not an idiot. I used to think his detractors (like Atrios, who I think you read because you react to him sometimes) were overstating the case, but man the longer he is in the public the eye the more it looks like they were right all along.
I mean, hell! Kevin says right here in this post that Musk only bought twitter because the courts made him.
And why were the courts able to make him? Because he waived all the normal due diligence protections that normally accompany a deal like this.
There's a word for that, and that word is idiotic.
Musk is decidedly eccentric, and he is clearly NOT risk averse. You don't become the world's richest person by being stupid, but when you are the world's richest person you can gamble with sums that make even ordinarily rich people flinch. Musk bought Twitter on, apparently, impulse and did so without doing all the due diligence that would normally accompany a transaction of that size. I haven't examined the relevant contract, and am not even sure that it's publicly available, but it's clearly not accurate to say that he waived ALL the normal due diligence.
It appears that the total purchase price for Twitter was about a quarter of Musk's net worth. It's a big amount even for him, but remember that not all the purchase money is Musk's; there are known to be other investors.
The zero interest-rate policies of the past decade made a lot of eccentric weirdos look like they were business geniuses.
Agreed. Also the man's staff is the who and what that has made him wealthy. He has the problem of Trump - not listening to them.
Yeah, if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, then chances are it IS a duck.
I have avoided jumping aboard the "Elon Musk is an idiot train" mainly because he is, plainly, not an idiot.
This isn't so. At all.
Musk isn't an idiot in the "can't tie his own shoes" sense, or even in the "barely literate moron" sense.
But... I dunno, Kevin. What would YOU call someone who continually takes enormous illegal risks on billion-dollar scales (Tesla's entire history is one rife with criminality and blood; there's a strong case to be made that the company would have folded long ago without it) with massive paper trails, and has only avoided prison, not because these were calculated risks, but simply because he got very lucky?
Because I feel like "mouth has consistently written checks ass cannot cash, not because he's a skilled conman, but because he's a desperate hack with a fragile ego, and has set money on fire and gotten people killed trying to cash said checks..." well, that's a kind of idiocy. It's an accurate description.
Occam's Razor says he's an idiot. Where did you ever get the opposite impression?
The fact that somebody does _some_ idiotic things doesn't make him/her an idiot. We all do that. It is consistently doing idiotic things that gives the title, and Musk does not consistently do idiotic things.
> Musk does not consistently do idiotic things
Really? Like, I dunno, getting stoned and claiming you're taking your public company private at $420 and getting smacked by the SEC for it, and then getting stoned and agreeing to buy Twitter at $54.20?
Or laying off people who actually keep the lights on, and then having to go beg them to come back?
Or apparently still entirely missing the point about why advertisers don't want to see their logo next to trailer park nazi typing the N word repeatedly?
Elmo has spent the last several months stepping on every rake placed in front of him and then begging for more to be scattered around.
Beyond that, it's obvious that he recognizes Twitter was a dumb, impulsive purchase. He's only running it because a court wouldn't let him wiggle out of it.
Not sure I agree. Twitter was a purchase that he bid far too high for. He went to court to try to renegotiate for a lower price. The court trial could have continued, but he (and his friends, political and otherwise) were gonna get a shitload of shit press about their doings, some of probably illegal. He shut down the suit to shut down the bad news. If he just wanted out of the deal, he could have paid a billion and walked (far cheaper than seeing Tesla lose market cap of $250 billion and counting). But he went forward with the purchase anyway. What happened behind the scenes (getting a few billion from the Saudis, e.g.) is anybody's guess, but it wasn't because he tried to wiggle out of it and failed.
I won't be surprised if in a year or two all the major social media platforms are owned by China, the Saudis, and Zuckerberg.
I have avoided jumping aboard the "Elon Musk is an idiot train" mainly because he is, plainly, not an idiot.
Idiots are as idiots do. Based on what he's done with Twitter so far, the guy is an idiot. The days (rational) people thought of him as a genius or evil genius are over.
(He's still a transformative figure in the auto and space biz.)
It is not true that Musk could have just paid a $1 fee to walk away. That clause required certain external events to happen for it to be exercised, namely, the loss of third party funding. But Musk's funders had already signed binding commitments, hence why the deal went all the way to trial. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/13/elon-musk-cant-just-walk-away-from-twitter-deal-by-paying-1-billion.html
Aha. Thanks.
Still, if he had backed out, paid the one billion fee and settled for a few billion more for breach of contract, he'd probably be wealthier than by going through with it. The "not an idiot" evidence is still lacking.
Nope. He signed a contract to pay a set amount. He couldn't just back out and get his hand slapped. Delaware's Chancery court doesn't mess around.
Know what other corporation is subject to that court? Tesla. The idea that Musk could've just shrugged and walked away at some small fraction of the purchase price just ain't true. If he could have, he would have.
Anything that leaves Musk wealthier than he would be if he went through with the deal, would leave Twitter's shareholders less wealthy than they would be if Musk went through with the deal. Twitter's board of directors is supposed to represent the interests of Twitter's shareholders, and they appear to have taken their obligations seriously. The were going to make him go through with the deal or pay enough to make Twitter's shareholders equally well off.
Maybe it should be purple checks in addition to blue checks.
Then checks for public service, contributions to humanity, really good snark, deep shade or a serious burn, like roasted.
You could get a whole set, like the wild Pokémon of Twitter, and then sell them, sell your massively decorated impressive Twitter account to collectors and enthusiasts. Isn't that really a better kind of NFT? Elon, you genius!
Purple hearts, green clovers, blue diamonds...
And black swastikas. If we're going for high-semantic-content identifiers.
Musk is a very, very rich guy, born into jet-setting privilege, who, like many of his ilk, is surrounded by sycophants, high on his own supply of ego, and mistakes it for wisdom. He may not be "duh duh" stupid but he appears to lack any degree of self-awareness. In other words, he doesn't know what he doesn't know, and doesn't care. So not "stupid" perhaps, but very foolish.
Maybe I'm naive, but for the owner of Twitter to tweet yesterday that everyone should vote Republican seems like a violation of something or other. I guess it must be legal, but if I were an advertiser I might find this unsettling.
It's not a violation of the law (1st Amendment protects private speech) but it's a violation of good business sense- Democrats buy stuff too, and the vast majority of Twitter's would-be advertisers do not want to be perceived as partisan.
Please note the careful wording: perception is the name of the game. I would venture that a majority of C-suites have Republican tendencies, vote for Republicans, and are generally pleased when Republicans win elections, but unlike Musk, they are not stupid about their customers and do not want their corporate brand closely associated with either party.
What's the Twitter alternative?
I see people are moving to Mastodon or CounterSocial, but I'd never have the time to look at both of them. Twitter may be a thing where only thevone thing ofbitvcan work, --like a toilet in the bathroom you don't need two.
On the other hand if someone came up with a tweet reader that would vacuum them all together I could see that working.
The struggle going on within a layer of the affluent middle class for position and privilege reveals accumulation of wealth is the greatest virtue preventing characterizations of idiocy.
Just saw this on Twitter,
https://mobile.twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1590208914112811008
It seems possible that the tweet offering to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share was made when Musk, stoned, thought that was a good idea and also funny ("4.20").
And Musk's free-speech absolutism — and he said numerous times that he was a free-speech absolutist — does not include speech that makes fun of him. He seems quite often not to think before he blurts out ideas that most would call "ill conceived" or "half-baked" or "idiotic." That is, Musk himself may not be an idiot, but quite frequently he says things that (a moment's reflection would show) are idiotic.
Kevin says Musk is plainly not an idiot. Yet the next two sentences - "Twitter was a dumb, impulsive purchase. He's only running it because a court wouldn't let him wiggle out of it" - disprove the statement, let alone the rest of the post.
The difference between idiocy and idiosyncracies is money.
Being brash and risk-taking when starting a start up can serve you well. But it won't scale well, and can turn into just being obnoxious and dangerous.
When people are surrounded with yes-men, they lose any checks and balances.
Brilliant people can truly be polymaths. Or they can go off the deep end--see Linus Pauling.
As the old saying goes:
Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
I am quite certain that Musk has a fair amount of intelligence. I am equally certain that he has no wisdom whatsoever.
Elon Musk liked this tweet,
https://mobile.twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1590358280458899459
So he is not an idiot but does dumb things. Got it.
Well, he's surely proof that Woody Allen was right when in Annie Hall his character says the people at a fancy New York literary party "prove you can be brilliant and have absolutely no idea what's going on."
The LA Times columnist Mary McNamara had a nice column about Musk learning anew what newspaper execs have now known for a few decades. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-11-02/column-elon-musks-twitter-and-the-con-of-online-media
I dunno. I'm part of the crowd that thinks Elon Musk isn't all that bright and has poor impulse control on top of it. Paypal was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time (same for Peter Thiel). He stole Tesla from the founders and has been trying to pass it off as his creation ever since. His other companies are hits when they get massive government subsidies (SpaceX) and duds when they don't (The Boring Company). You don't have to be smart to suck at the government teat.
Frankly, I think being a Libertarian is a strong indicator that you aren't that bright.
He could have, were he willing to pay the $1B breakup fee and unspecified penalties. Instead, he decided that it was better if all of Twitter's losses were his personal losses -- those loans were guaranteed by his personal assets. Time will tell whether this was a wise decision.
The problem illustrated w/ the blue checkmark fiasco is that Musk does not know what he's doing in this space (pun intended). So in lieu of investigating the cost-benefit of proposed policies, he's gone gung-ho with ad hoc rules, changing daily.
Today, he told us the obvious: He's throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks.
Can you live with this level of chaos? Most people can't. When are you going to join Mastodon?