Elon Musk does not have impostor syndrome
Fresh Air did an entertaining and informative discussion of Elon Musk’s bull in a china shop approach to Twitter yesterday with tech journalist Casey Newton.
Terry Gross: SpaceX and Tesla have been considered such big success stories, and credit has gone to Elon Musk. Twitter is showing a different side of him – indecisive, making decisions then retracting them. Twitter is losing money and advertisers under his leadership. He’s making decisions that are driving away Twitter users. Are you surprised by what kind of leader he’s turned out to be as the owner of Twitter?
Newton: You know, I really am. I had not paid a lot of attention to what Musk was doing at Tesla and SpaceX, but as you note, he was having a lot of success with those companies. And the Twitter that he inherited, while it had its challenges, was not a company in crisis. It made about $5 billion last year, has hundreds of millions of active users. And while it clearly needed to evolve, there was sort of no pressing need to blow it up and start over. And yet from the moment that he stepped into that job, that seems to be exactly what he decided to do.
He has now eliminated close to three-quarters of the staff. He has implemented a bunch of ideas and then quickly reversed himself. And more than anything else, I think he’s given the impression that rather than operating according to some set plan, he’s really managing Twitter more by whims and what seems to him to be a good idea in the moment. And so that’s led to a lot of chaos.
Chaos is good, chaos is creative, yadda yadda. Let’s blow up some hospitals and start over.
GROSS: One of Musk’s strategies that seems to have backfired is dealing with verification. Can you describe what verification is and what Twitter’s policy had been before Musk took over?
NEWTON: Yeah. So Twitter started a verification policy in 2009, and the basic idea was that it needed a way to verify that the owner of an account was who they said it was. So if you were a politician, a journalist or a celebrity, if you were really that person, Twitter would verify that, and then you would get this little blue check mark on your profile. That’s how it had always worked. Musk came along and said he wanted verification to be open to a much wider number of people, which, by the way, I thought was a pretty good idea. I think there are a lot of good reasons why you might want people to be able to optionally verify their identity on Twitter. It can just sort of be good for the service overall.
But he made one really bad decision, which was that not only did he offer everyone a verification badge, it was no longer actually connected to any sort of idea of verification. All you needed to do was pay $8. You could create any account; you would get that little badge. And so people started to pretend to be brands. They started to be celebrities. They started to pretend to be Elon Musk. And that same blue verification badge that had only ever meant you are who you say you are all of a sudden now meant I have $8.
I laughed as hard as Terry Gross did.
GROSS: So getting back to the idea that Musk is kind of blowing up Twitter to remake it his way, he’s losing so much money in the process. I mean, other ways that he’s losing money – ’cause you’ve pointed this out – is re-platforming people and making all these changes. They’re really expensive. It requires a lot of engineering changes in order to make these changes on Twitter. Plus, there’s no longer as many engineers there now. So it’s almost like he’s sabotaging himself in trying to remake Twitter.
NEWTON: Yeah, I think, you know, for some leaders, it’s not a good idea unless they came up with it, right? And so people who worked at Twitter had all sorts of ideas about how you could improve the service, make it more profitable. Elon has gotten rid of most of those people, and he’s fixated on a few core ideas that he thinks are going to be spectacular. Subscriptions is probably the biggest one although there are others. And he’s just going to go for it.
You know, this is probably one of the most self-confident people in the entire world, right? Elon Musk does not have impostor syndrome. He wakes up every day convinced that he is the only person who knows how to fix this company. And, you know, as me – for me, an observer, I just sort of sit back and think, like, none of this is working, you know? And so to me, the question is, will he ever acknowledge that other people have better ideas for this company than he does? Or will he just sort of continue to charge ahead with his own ideas, you know, regardless of if they’re successful or not?
Probably.
But did Elon pony up his $8?
Well, no, that’s not a different side to him. Hands-on tinkering, trying things out, not being afraid to admit he was wrong and change tack, always has been his style.
Evidence for this? He has, after all, reduced the payroll (by far the biggest cost) by about three quarters. (And many predicted that as a result Twitter would soon fall over in a heap; it hasn’t.)
It’ll be interesting to see actual stats on this, a few months downstream, after all the smoke clears.
Yes, some dislike Musk and have left Twitter. But Musk has produced graphs showing the overall number of users increasing. Twitter is, after all, getting a heck of a lot of free publicity at the moment.
… other than the blatant political partisanship.
But it’s not really a hospital, where sick kids die if you get something wrong, it’s just a bunch of Tweets.
This is just incoherent. The cost here is the time of the engineers on the payroll. Being on the payroll he has to pay them regardless of whether they are implementing changes. So it would only be “really expensive” if he were having to hire lots of new staff to do it. But the reality is the exact opposite, he has cut payroll by 70 to 80 percent. So that paragraph makes no sense at all.
Strange, then, that it was not actually profitable, given all those people working there with all those great ideas.
Except that Twitter is indeed working, and quite a lot of the stuff that is being changed actually sounds quite good.
Well, to answer that, why not read your own critique, about how he accepted that he’d screwed up on the verification/impersonation thing and quickly changed tack? He is indeed willing to try things out, see if they work, and change them if they don’t. We’ve seen that already (and it’s long been his style at other companies).
So this critique is not even self-consistent and really just amounts to the standard dislike of Musk.
I for one, welcome the drive towards transparency and political neutrality that Musk has promised, hoping that he fulfills it.
PS to add: NPR hate Musk because they are woke and Musk is anti-woke.
They really hate the fact that the woke people previously in charge of Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” division are no long able to ban or shadow-ban any non-woke content at will.
I on the other hand hope he destroys Twitter and damages himself in the process because he’s a puffed up nob with delusions of grandeur.
He should refocus his efforts on making Tesla and SpaceX better since we actually need those, and not just remaking that hellsite into a rightoid mirror image of its trans-affirming self.
Wow, an actual Muskrat in the wild….
Anywho, I still think the most plausible explanation for all of this is that Elon realized two things:
1: He was addicted to Twitter;
2: He was unpopular on Twitter.
His narcissism rendered him both unable to quit Twitter, or to tolerate the increasing levels of mockery he was being subjected to on the platform. So he bought it, and is now trying to drive it into the ground, kind of like an alcoholic in a moment of clarity digging out all their secret stash bottles and dumping them down the sink.
I agree that indecisive is the wrong word for him, as I would consider indecisiveness an inability to choose a course of action; dithering due to uncertainty, as opposed to choosing and then backtracking. With that need to backtrack in mind, a better word would be rash, hasty, thoughtless, precipitous… you see where I am going with this. Yes he is making decisions, but they are whims and edicts conceived seemingly off the top of his head, when he should be taking time to become informed and discuss possibilities with his staff. Their combined experience was a resource he could have used, but instead he fired three quarters of them.
Yet we can see from Tesla and SpaceX that this is not always his approach. I think the difference is due to the nature of the work those companies do – engineering, as opposed to social media. He knows very well that he can’t design an engine, calculate flight paths, test materials, and so on that goes into making a rocket or car, so he pays many skilled professionals to do that ‘hard’ science stuff.
But with Twitter is social, a ‘soft’ science at most, and he seems to have been wholly naive about the legal ramifications of permitted speech. So he marched in and barked orders, only to discover that there were reasons for things being the way they were after he ruined them.
I am not surprised to learn that Coel is an admirer of Elon Musk. I wonder where this desire to grovel before billionaire narcissists derives from.
I’m sure there are scientists who have told Musk the practical impossibility of colonizing Mars. What’s the point of consulting experts if you don’t listen. How many zillions of tons of the Earth’s natural resources would he jettison into space to acheive some kind of unsustainable bubble, so far away from human concerns that it wouldn’t matter? There is no useable water or oxygen anywhere else in the solar system, it would have to come from our already deteriorating ecosystems here on Earth. For starters! If you ask me, he’s a fecking idiot. Luxury electric golf carts for egotistical conspicuous consumers. Luxury that’s recharged largely by fossil fuel powered generators, miles away. Nevermind that, you can look down your nose at your planet ruining neighbors with their economy cars. Not to mention the mining done for battery production, or disposal of same — all fossil fuel powered, all high impact on the environment. Tesla shmesla. Overpriced, overhyped egomobiles.
What he’s good at is fooling people into going along with his shitty ideas, and having them pay him for the privelege. Cha ching! What he’s good at is capitalism. Buying twitter is another good example of a bad idea. Whether he “fixes” it or not, it’s still twitter. Meh. If these things make him some kind of folk hero or genius then I’ll eat my hat. There are plenty of idiots with more money than brains, it’s quite common.
Elton John has quit twitter. He didn’t just quit though, he said why. Way to go Elon. Unbanning and rebanning Kanye West wasn’t enough. (lol)
Colonizing Mars involves a lot of other technological innovation along the way though… most especially the space elevator. Then there’s working on shit to make it livable… solving that problem would also be useful making Terra more habitable even as it undergoes massive ecological shifts.
No, it ain’t a solution to our problems, but we *do* need capabilities to move around the solar system. We also need to keep civilization alive long enough to get there.
In any case there’s plenty of water ice in our solar system; we can make water and oxygen if we can get our other shit together.
Easy, it comes from supporting free speech, and the idea that major utilities such as Twitter should be politically neutral, and from wanting societal conversation to remain grounded in reality.
Musk is not ideal, I’d prefer a politically-neutral and independent regulatory board for near-monopoly companies such as Twitter and Google. But that’s not (currently) on offer, and one thing the US does not do at all well is politically-neutral anything (cf SCOTUS).
So, I’ll take Musk as a good second best, a centrist-minded moderate who genuinely supports free speech (way too rare at the moment), and is willing to stake his own money in making that happen, for the overall good of society.
Do readers of this blog really prefer the previous regime, led by Yoel Roth, who wanted the banning of any account that (for example) points out that Rachel Levine is actually a man? (And resigned because Musk wouldn’t accept that.) Seriously? We can either have a society where we can openly state biological facts, or we can have a society where saying such a thing can only be done in hushed tones in private and in samizdat literature.
Yes, I support Musk for that reason, and hope he succeeds in what he’s trying to achieve at Twitter. And I’m rather enjoying the temper trantrums from woke media outlets such as NPR.
PS For all the disparagement, Twitter seems to be in rude good health, and improving.
PPS If all the woke scolds who can’t cope with biological reality (aka “misgendering”) decamp to Mastadon (where they can all disappear up their own woke purity spiral) then that’s likely a good thing, and a welcome return to sanity in mainstream conversation.
PPPS The idea that Musk was “unpopular on Twitter”, with only 100 million followers, is rather amusing, they can’t all have been hate follows and rubber-neckers.
PPPPS Anyone who doesn’t have a degree of admiration for Musk needs to recalibrate themselves. Starting with $14,000 seed funding from your dad, and using that to found and lead, not just one, but a succession of highly successful companies, in the process becoming the world’s richest man, is a fairly notable achievement by any standards. What have you achieved in your life?
Free speech (a principle which requires some unpacking) is not an unpopular idea, or a new one. It doesn’t follow that if you aren’t in awe of Musk that you’re an anti-free-speech woketard. Free speech requires a power structure. Musk wants control, and he wants to pay for it. That’s fine, a fool and his money and all, but the idea that twitter is somehow broken and needs to be fixed is absurd. His best move would be to shut it down altogether and let the social media landscape evolve into something else, possibly better, possibly worse. That’s the thing, it mirrors the people who use it, some good, some bad, depending on what or who you focus on. There is no inherent quality of goodness to be tapped from the platform itself. It was created, and exists only as a means to make money. It looks to me as if any transformation Musk brings about is only an attempt to make more money. His end game isn’t all that noble.
I disagree, give the dominance of Twitter, the fact that it can arbitrarily shut down the Twitter account of the New York Post in the weeks running up to an election shows that it is broken. OK, you might disagree, but the suggestion is not “absurd”.
Are you actually ok with a Twitter, and perhaps an internet, where you cannot say “men are not women” without getting banned? The people who would ban you from Twitter for saying that would ban you from the internet entirely, if they could.
Many of them quite explicitly want “misgendering” to be a criminal offence! In the UK, the police have visited people for nothing worse than that! There are many university departments where saying “men are not women” is career suicide. That’s not an exaggeration.
Again, I disagree. Many companies are both a boon to society and a way of making money. This is why capitalism works, by aligning making money with providing goods and services that benefit people.
And yet again, I disagree. For one thing, spending all that money to buy Twitter actually makes very little sense if the aim is to make money (and anyhow, Musk has plenty of the stuff already).
I actually think that Musk is being straightforward and honest is telling us exactly what his motivations are. And that is that he is worried about the rapid slide away from valuing free speech in society today. He’s said that things like the NY Post episode, and the banning of Babylon Bee over the Rachel Levine satire, helped form his opinion.
Musk has stated that in the last four elections he voted Obama, Obama, Clinton and Biden. He’s also said that next time he could well vote for DeSantis. Like many, he’s perturbed by the woke turn of the left, which now deplores free speech and open discussion and instead seeks to get its way by banning any dissent.
On this blog, Ophelia documents a lot of this woke censorship of anything critical of gender ideology (including saying lots of stuff that she could not have said on Twitter!).
Musk, with his mega wealth, formed a plan that was rather more radical: simply buy Twitter and stop them censoring! Turn it into a politically neutral venue for open discussion.
That does not mean, as the critics allege, accepting harassment, misinformation and spam, but it does mean that people should be free to voice opinions that others find “offensive” and want to shut down.
If you want an internet where you can say “trans women are men”, then you should at least support Musk in principle, even if you (understandably) have reservations about him as a person.
Yoel Roth (previous head of Twitter’s Trust and Safety division) wants an internet where you are not allowed to “misgender” people like Jessica Yaniv and Lia Thomas, nor state facts about their biology. Musk thinks that should be allowed. Which of them do you want in charge?
Well buddy, I sure don’t think twitter or any social media proper is a boon to society. Communication yes, but a free for all where everyone’s opinion is equally valid, no. Keeping one’s every inner thought to themselves is a lost art. Discussion is one thing, but most of what I’ve seen on twitter (admittedly not much) is garbage. I think I’ll agree, that the level of control over political opinions will fare better under Musk rather than Roth, on that one point anyway. Ultimately, I’m not against Musk owning twitter to do with as he chooses. In fact I could give a rat, because don’t partake in it. I also don’t want a Tesla — you couldn’t pay me to own one. I think he’s been clever about how he’s made money, but I don’t think he did it by providing anyone any kind of service or product they couldn’t get elsewhere or do without entirely. The circumstance of his wealth wasn’t entirely his doing either, although he is more respectable than inheritors like Trump. Neither has any kind of special genius that I’ve seen. Not that everyone is required to, but the exaltation these characters get is entirely undeserved. They are both self impressed cults of personality who profit under false pretenses. I don’t believe in or believe them.
I have no doubt that Musk’s aim is to make money, and the power to own and run twitter, while not immediately profitable, won’t cost him anything in the long run. He could make more money sooner elsewhere, but what fun would that be, as you say, he’s got plenty. He’ll make more from twitter.
Sorry, BKiSA. I find a lot of what you say insightful and right on, but I really don’t think either of these things is a “need”. I do think keeping civilization alive is a “drive” but that is not the same as a need.
And needing capabilities to move around the solar system? Nope. The “needs” we have are survival resources, and we don’t get those that way.
Besides, trashing our own planet isn’t a good argument for the need to move around elsewhere. And those locked into the engineering of the thing are always ignoring one thing: the biology of the thing. In the end, we are life, and it is ALL about biology. We can engineer a lot of things, but here’s a heads up: With wastewater treatment, we kept building bigger and bigger engineering marvels that were expensive, messy, and wasteful. They didn’t remove all the things we needed to remove. We returned to a biological based system, and we’re doing a much better job. Yes, we still needed engineers, but if the engineers refuse to listen to the biologists, a lot of things don’t work.
Coel, trying to make something more profitable is not the same as saying it isn’t profitable. Just sayin’.
It’s funny, as much as I enjoy science fiction, I don’t understand why more people aren’t just as fascinated with the hard sciences. I guess it spoils the suspended disbelief for them to know too many facts about the world. All that reality creeping in is no bueno.
Maybe I’m just a “glass half empty” kinda guy, but I’m not so sure that it would work this way. Those “massive ecological shifts” are our fault. We already know that much of what we’re doing to the Earth shouldn’t be done, yet we do it anyway. A Mars colony will be a distant, isolated luxury bubble where everyone knows they have to be careful lest they do something stupid that kills everyone. We’re already living in a planet-sized bubble subject to the same rules, it’s just taken a few millenia for our numbers and mistakes to catch up with us. It’s taken more of them, but their effects will turn out to be equally lethal. There’s nothing a Mars colony will teach us that we don’t already know. We already know we shouldn’t dump toxic wastes into the air, water and soil we rely on to breathe, drink, and grow food. The world has become smaller, and it’s all interconnected. We’ve learned too late that “over there” is “right here,” and that you can’y throw anything “away.” We already know that the Earth’s ability to absorb these wastes is limited. We are running into the limits of the bubble in which we already live, and upon which we are utterly, inescapably dependent. If we can’t make things work here, colonies elsewhere (which will themselves remain dependent upon Earth) are pointless, as we will be taking our mistakes with us.
It took just under twenty years for the lessons of the Apollo One fire to be forgotten. The Challenger disaster did not prevent the pressures and complacency that resulted in the destruction of Columbia seventeen years after that. (And that’s just the American space experience; the Russian track record has its fair share of incompetance and heedless, expedient risk-taking.) Any Mars colony will have its own version of shoddy construction, O-rings and foam-shedding. We as a species have already blown through any number of the equivalents of faulty wiring, O-rings and tile damage. We are seeing the very real possibility of a planetary scale loss of mission, loss of vehicle, loss of crew, yet we push on with what NASA’s repeated inquiries called “go fever.”
The best thing we could be doing is reducing our ecological footprint, reducing the pressure that humans are putting on the rest of the living and non-living environment. Even without anthropogenic climate change, human overshoot is an ongoing crisis. Our sheer numbers limit our ability to do this; having eight billion humans places a certain minimum level on the level of activity which must take place to keep all of them alive and healthy, but we’re not even doing a very good job of that, thanks in part to extreme, grotesque inequalities of wealth distribution (Hello Mr. Musk. Fancy meeting you here!). Decreasing the human population is key to the drawdown of human demands upon the planet. It will happen, one way or another. If you think human dictatorships are bad, wait ’til you see Nature’s idea of draconian measures. We can try to manage our numbers ourselves, or they will be managed for us. If we do not step back, we will be stepped on.
The continued pursuit of a suicidally unsustainable way of life will result in disaster for ourselves and many other living creatures. That we allow ourselves to be led along such a path by those who can make a quick buck off of it while the ride lasts seems to be a lethal flaw in our make-up. That all of us have heard of and have been forced to pay any attention at all to the likes of Elon Musk (or Donald Trump!) and anything he thinks or does is a symptom of this. That his wealth gives him such power and influence is a sign of our weakness and immaturity as a society and a species. This mind-set cannot be fixed by throwing engineering at it. Our technological development has outstripped our ability inclination to use it wisely.
In the next few decades, we’ll likely be facing massive disruptions of weather patterns and climatic zones, with cascading follow-on effects on agriculture, and whatever surviving natural biomes that might yet be hanging on. Add rising sea levels and island/coastal inundation, and you have the foundation for the collapse and disappearance of nations (some of which are armed with nuclear weapons) and the mass movement (and death) of hundreds of millions of people. Even if we avoid actual armed conflict, the damage, distruction and displacement will make the two World Wars combined look like the proverbial Sunday school picnic. Unless its life support systems were wildly chaotic, and its inhabitants unpredictably violent, I’m not sure that there are many lessons we could learn from a Mars outpost that would be applicable to living on Earth That’s Almost Here.
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And some companies (or economic activities) trade in bad ideas that still make some people money. Products and services that people bought and used came out of these businesses and activities, but they were bad ideas nonetheless. Profitability is no guarenteed measure of rectitude. While some got richer, the world is often a poorer and crueler place due to the morality of the marketplace.
Some people decided it was a good idea to turn Great Auks into down pillows and comforters, (or, as in the case of the last pair reliably known to have existed, stuffed specimens for a collector). Others turned whales into corset stays, lubricants, margarine and catfood. And just to be inclusive with our regard to our own species, (quite apart from poor pay and dangerous working conditions that often underlay cheap labour,) there’s a market for human organ harvesting. And babies (via “surrogacy”.) And I’m sure that somewhere along the line, somebody made money from producing Zyklon B.