One user responded basically asking is Twitter a tech company which is a totally fair question, I would propose that there's at least a decent chance that running Twitter solely like a tech company will lead to... challenges.

And second, he seems to really hate this idea that founders are criticized by the plebes (https://nitter.net/paulg/status/1591098388317179908) . 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't?

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!

Having been on the side of trying to do something unpopular, the worst kind of feedback you can get is no feedback at all.

> In both those companies, people die if the software doesn't work right.

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.

Major oversight by Paul here. Elon is a knob and always will be. Soon nobody is going to want to work for him in any industry.

Is that fact or wishful thinking? It’s hard for me to believe that nobody is going to want to work for the most prominent business man of the decade.

A lot of people won't want to work for him, but a minority will want to a lot mostly for political/cultural reasons. I suppose if it's sustainable for the tech world to bifurcate the way the media world has Elon could be the Rupert Murdoch of tech.

From my perspective right wing brands tend to have a .. how to put it .. second rate or imitation feel to them and working for them seems akin to playing professional basketball in Europe rather than the NBA.... That's off putting to me personally but probably feels first rate and awesome to the intended audience. So maybe his brands will remain mainstream but they are at risk of being ghettoized into the American flag with a flaming skull painted on the hood of your Dodge Challenger demographic.

We'll see how it works out for him! If it succeeds it's bound to make life worse for the kinds of people who don't share his ideological and cultural positions just because he'll prove that it's economically viable to alienate them. For that reason, yes, I think they are hoping for him to fail and the predictions that he definitely will have an air of wishful thinking to them.

He's only prominent because he makes a lot of noise

So he's not prominent for having been the current richest person alive at various points or for leading a company that revolutionized commercial spaceflight?

It's just for making noise? Strange.

Throw enough money at problems and you'll solve some

Other rich people do this too they just don't brag about it on twitter constantly

Is the difficulty of running a company proportional to the technical difficulty of the problems it attempts to solve? I believe there's a lot more to running a company than finding a solution to a technical problem without killing anyone in the process.

I think it'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's the point of broadcasting this simplistic, condescending viewpoint to his followers?

If I was one, I would feel that he's looking down on me. "We smart, you dumb. We do thing good, so we also do other thing good. Shut up and clap for creator."

> Is the difficulty of running a company proportional to the technical difficulty of the problems it attempts to solve? I believe there's a lot more to running a company than finding a solution to a technical problem without killing anyone in the process.

Twitter as it is ("public square") may be one of the hardest companies in the world to run. Not because of the technical problems, but because of the people problems. There are just no concrete solutions to most problems, and everything is constantly backsliding. You're basically trying to play mediator to all the political divide in America, without cutting the baby in half, and that's just the American audience! I recall Yishan pointing out that Jack meditated like 4 hours a day to handle it. But I also Suspect Elon cares a lot less about maintaining the public square component in the face of his debt, so that may make it a lot easier.

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?

that he is great at doing stuff like thinking big and breaking down barriers but probably needs others with more stability to rein him in.

Too bad he fires them

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/advertising (which are the actual products of twitter) and scaling of that system, abstraction layers to make scaling feasible, etc.

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'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't pass the smell test for BS.

Imagine if Elon had instead come in and not immediately idled half the company. But instead wrote an inspiring message about Twitter was popular and pretty good but not living up to its full potential. Spend about 2-3 months learning all the details of the internal systems. Meet daily with the heads of every area and listen to what they're saying. Then, after about 3 or 4 months, come up with a plan that clearly indicates he expects more effort from the employee base, and anybody who doesn't want to sign up for that is free to leave. Then make a modest set of reasonable changes, do some testing on the new features, and slowly improve the product.

The opportunity was there to do this, but Elon is just a chaos ninja and is very big into unforced errors that negatively affect his own success.

Is disabling the 2fa miceoservice without removing existing 2fa from accounts better for user experience?

Users normally like to log into services they use, but I may be wrong.

That's exactly my point - he is forcing changes to be made (turn off microservices) without understanding what they do or why they are there - its from the viewpoint of "we don't need all those microservices, its bloat and does nothing for users".

It's sort of like watching somebody learn about Chesterton's fence for the first time.

Dang contacted me out of band regaridng this comment and I'll say here what I said there:

I stand by my comments. It kind of looks like you're sympathetic to Musk here.

What Musk is doing is abnormal and needs to be condemned in the most effective way possible. I have determined that occasionally making short statements that are entirely technically correct is the most effective way to do so. I do so in good faith with the goal of this site having high quality comments. This sort of policing seems quite wrong to an experienced Internet user- some of my one-liner comments on the net from the 1980s and 90s can still be found.

Did he want more verbiage? “GIGO” is an acceptable comment if it’s applicable and that’s only four characters.

Yes, he clarified. He wants people who are writing comments in good faith to show more intent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33623956)

I read that exchange and I knew exactly what the first comment meant and didn't have to read the longer explanation. I've been on the internet for 30+ years and have learned how to have subtle and enjoyable conversations and how to extract the meaning and feeling behind short comments. I don't want this site to be pages and pages of pages-long comments saying little.

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.

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/Play Store fees doesn'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't necessarily provide any direct benefits here.

Regardless of how one might feel about Musks'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't been CEO of a tech company before.

If anything I take this is a grand illustration of the dangers inherent in playing at being a CEO when you don'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.”

The question here is, can Elon find enough shortcuts and ideas that work and recover sufficiently from failures for the ones that don’t?

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.

https://thedriven.io/2020/11/04/elon-musk-tesla-almost-went-...

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're a "successful founder".

pg should really ask himself whether he wants to defend a person who is as morally bankrupt as Elon Musk.

I don't feel like Elon is gonna be successful with his approach. But I worry even more about a world in which he is successful and this kind of asshole behaviour is normalised.

Somehow, a subset of tech culture has embraced the idea that as long as you're technically brilliant (and/or filthy rich), you get to play entirely by your own rules without any consideration for other people.

I don't need to be a pilot to know something's wrong when an airliner is careening towards the ground at a steep angle.

The title of a submission should be the original title of the submitted page, shortened if necessary—not a comment.

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'm not sure I would have given anyone with $8 a blue checkmark. But i'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's failing). Drastic transformation is necessary.

He probably deserves a proportional amount of hate relative to the nexus of power and money he has accumulated.

Also, twitter was cash flow positive. It would feel like a money-making business to you if you owned it. It was only the stock-based compensation that caused it to lose money. But of course, that is just diluting shareholders and not actually losing money on operations.

I'd say the hate is proportional to his own PR. Musk is clearly someone who likes the limelight. Plenty of CEOs fly under the radar of the public, any negativity or mistakes also fly under the radar or get rolled into "Company X did this bad thing".

It seems like he's putting the philosophy of the far right flank of the tech world into practice here. He's taking Curtis Yarvin's "companies are monarchies"** concept to heart when he e.g. provokes his employees and then fires them when they respond to the provocation. In other words he values loyalty over competence.

A strict command and control environment like he seems to be building has a proven track record of succeeding at some things for some stretches of time. I mean, it's how most governments operate during war times right? Is it going to help him make back his 44 billion here and now? We'll see. It's a grand experiment.

The only thing I can say for sure is that if his experiment succeeds the lives of normal employees at tech firms will suffer regardless of their personal beliefs or allegiances. The permissiveness and abundance we've all enjoyed due to the emphasis on teamwork and harmony by tech companies for the past few decades has been really pleasant compared to what will come if the harsher Elon model takes off in the context of an ad driven software first tech company as opposed to a hardware focused firm.

note **: I've read everything Yarvin has written from Unqualified Reservations to his interviews in dissident right outlets to his current substack. I remain convinced that he says monarchy when he means fascism because he's socially aware enough to avoid the baggage of that word and, from my perspective, his ultimate project is trying to build an ideological pipeline from wealthy libertarian to strong-man loving fascist. Interesting guy! I feel like everyone should read him so that they can understand the moves of people like Peter Thiel [a long time patron of Yarvin].

update: oh here we go, I Googled him to see what he's been up to lately and found this nice article. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23373795/curtis-yarv...

I realize Vox will put off the conservatives here, but, y'know, you all are gonna like Yarvin anyway lmao. Just go read his stuff. He'll give you tons of smart sounding quips, hypothetical scenarios and anecdotes that will dazzle and impress right wing audiences.