More Evidence Elon Musk is Losing His Flippin’ Mind

[ThirstyBarbarian]

If... if thats what he did.

I don’t think there’s any doubt he had the algorithm changed to promote his own tweets into the feeds of all Twitter users. Thousands of people were commenting on their experience of finding dozens of his Tweets in their feeds even though they don’t follow him. That really happened.

 

[rocket_troy]

This Twitter deal never made any sense to me. This is different from his past companies. Twitter is not a straight engineering challenge like most of his other ventures. Twitter deals with messy humans and their weird behaviors, communications, emotions, psychology, values, passions, etc. These are not things Musk seems to understand very well. He does not appear to have much emotional intelligence. So far, it doesn’t look to me like his management of Twitter has been a success.

And what’s with wasting company resources boosting his own Twitter engagements? That doesn’t seem like a business genius at work.

Agreed. Problem is he built up so much entrepreneurial/investor capital with brilliant successes from ventures with marginal business cases, that allowed him to overextend into an ideological distraction like twitter. It was hubris in its purest form and his backers followed him down that sewer hole like lemmings Russian Solders to the slaughter.

TP

 

[ThirstyBarbarian]

Ahhh...but just think how cutting edge AND profitable it will be once he and his engineers master the eccentricities of the common folk. Doing this by considering it an "engineering challenge" may be needed to contend with all the nut-jobs that establish the first few colonies on Mars (or something like that). In reality, it isn't anything different than the "AI" work that is going on by other engineering consortiums out there...

Twitter is financially better off today than yesterday. Lots of reasons why and this could be a "bow wave" before the crash considering all the changes made over the last year since he bought it. Twitter was bloated. It was corrupt. Now, arguably, it's neither and the question that has to be answered is, is that a better direction to go in or was the former what the coddled "masses" really wanted.

Perhaps "boosting his own Twitter engagements" is nothing more than the typical efforts of a "focus group" but with a much wider audience.

I’m skeptical. We will have to wait and see.

 

[Funkworks]

The thing that makes the most sense to me is it’s a rich guy narcissist thing, not a savvy businessman thing.

Well, not worse than other rich guys originally, but people do change as they get richer, and he happens to be on top. Just a regular ambitious kid who got lucky when the internet blew up, and kept being lucky each time he “risked it all”. Many kids want to “change the world”. He’s just got no reason to change that. He’s in check. His company boards, shareholders, court systems, and clients do keep him on an acceptable path, and the Starship thing still does seem to be his main ambition.

Before that, though, was the soccer world cup. He was hosted in the Saudi box. I think he got a stern talking to from one of the biggest Twitter investors, because he really put a lid on the craziest stuff after that.

Maybe. I missed that one. He certainly has many meetings with many influential people. Incidentally, he openly said Tesla’s competition included Aramco.

 

[ThirstyBarbarian]

Do you have any public evidence that Twitter is in a better financial position than when he bought it? Granted, it had never (or nearly never) made money before, so being in the black at all would be an achievement. However, having all of Europe's regulators sharpening their knives for you isn't a great way forward either.

Yeah, I don’t think we really know much about the financial condition of the company now that it’s private. All we know is that its main sources of revenue prior to the sale—ad sales—is down.

 

[jbsommerfeldt]

I don’t think there’s any doubt he had the algorithm changed to promote his own tweets into the feeds of all Twitter users. Thousands of people were commenting on their experience of finding dozens of his Tweets in their feeds even though they don’t follow him. That really happened.

Oh I dont doubt it. I have never been on Twitter. Don't care. I'm just pointing out we dont know his world and can say anything we want without the entire planet riping it apart for all to see.

 

[Funkworks]

I think he lost something like $200 billion last year. He may be losing his boy genius mystique which is a really useful thing to have intact in business.

This Twitter deal never made any sense to me. This is different from his past companies. Twitter is not a straight engineering challenge like most of his other ventures. Twitter deals with messy humans and their weird behaviors, communications, emotions, psychology, values, passions, etc. These are not things Musk seems to understand very well. He does not appear to have much emotional intelligence. So far, it doesn’t look to me like his management of Twitter has been a success.

And what’s with wasting company resources boosting his own Twitter engagements? That doesn’t seem like a business genius at work.

His first companies in the 90s were websites and there‘s a plan to steer Twitter in a PayPal direction. The common thread in all his companies is coding coding coding. I don’t agree with many of his social comments but he understands the whole internet thing more than most. I suspect getting as much attention and as many connections as possible matters more to the business than saying perfect statements all the time. From his POV, it’s marketing for all his companies.

 

[DaHabes]

I think it’s more likely that being “the richest man alive” has screwed up his head.

Resulting in his no longer being "the richest man alive"....

 

[ThirstyBarbarian]

His first companies in the 90s were websites and there‘s a plan to steer Twitter in a PayPal direction. The common thread in all his companies is coding coding coding. I don’t agree with many of his social comments but he understands the whole internet thing more than most. I suspect getting as much attention and as many connections as possible matters more to the business than saying perfect statements all the time. From his POV, it’s marketing for all his companies.

What does it mean to “steer Twitter in a PayPal direction”?

 

[ThirstyBarbarian]

Resulting in his no longer being "the richest man alive"....

Correct. He’s fallen down the list a ways.

 

[jbsommerfeldt]

Correct. He’s fallen down the list a ways.

You know what, maybe he is the antichrist!?!

 

[DaHabes]

In the long term, I expect Tesla to be in bad shape. Once the mega car manufacturers ramp up, Tesla is in trouble. Once they get rolling and prices on batteries start dropping, it will be a price war he can't win. He'll get bled dry by all of the competition. His battery tech is old and his latest battery pack isn't working as planned. Unless he has a solid state battery design in his back pocket that will beat the competition, it's game over. At that point I expect him to jump on a Starship to Mars and die there as is his stated desire.

 

[cwbullet]

Twitter is a tool developed to enable teenage girls to tell their friends about their shopping purchases and evolved from there into a civilization-ending bullhorn for misinformation, bigotry, and hate.

Obviously it is not just for teenage girls since you know a lot about it.

 

[Bravo52]

Do you have any public evidence that Twitter is in a better financial position than when he bought it? Granted, it had never (or nearly never) made money before, so being in the black....

Twitter is nowhere near being in the black. IMO you have to discount the money paid for the company because there are too many opinions on what it's value was worth or not worth. That said, just on the surface by cutting >50% of the overhead means the company is better than it was before on that front. According to Yahoo advertising revenue was down in 2022 by 30-40% (depends on when you read the article) but they'll be able to make the first debt payment sometime in 2023 so that's still good. Other people like Forbes says they'll be back to pre-Elon revenue by the end of 2023. All of this is speculation because of the current inflation trends. Money just isn't worth what was a few years ago...

 

[OverTheTop]

Just logged onto Twitter. First time since August. Musk tweets everywhere. If it persists I will drop the app entirely.

 

[Tyeeking]

Correct. He’s fallen down the list a ways.

LOL. Exaggeration much? He dropped from number 1 to number 2 on the Forbes and other lists.

 

[cautery]

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Nothing good can come from me posting in this thread today. Not today "dark side". Nice try though.

 

[jderimig]

Perhaps a 'media' company that isn't chasing profits for profits sake is good for America.

I find it ironic that many here bemoan networks for chasing the green now mock Musk for losing money on Twitter.

 

[Funkworks]

What does it mean to “steer Twitter in a PayPal direction”?

I mean it could eventually be possible to make payments through Twitter, or Twitter could be part of a new App called “X”, which would include payments, as well as Twitter-like news. To better understand, look up “WeChat”. Note that he owns website www.x.com.



A sign of thawing relations:

 

[Bravo52]

A sign of thawing relations:

I don't think so... there are plenty of YouTube videos showing the Supercharger cost and time. The last one I looked at said it was $19.90 for a 185 mile charge and it only took 45 min... Seems like a bit of a "profit" in there for Tesla.

 

[jahhash]

According to numerous reports, Elon Musk was unhappy that one of Joe Biden’s Super Bowl tweets got more engagement than one of his own tweets, so he had the engineering team “fix” the algorithm to boost Musk‘s tweets by a factor of 1,000. Now Musk’s tweets are being promoted into the For You feed for all users, even those who do not follow him. The “fix” to the algorithm was basically to bypass the algorithm for Musk’s tweets and simply move them to the top of the feed for all users. Apparently, this is the solution the engineers came up with when told to solve the “problem” or be fired.

Lol! What an insecure and megalomaniacal turd Elon is turning out to be! I had a TON of respect for what he has accomplished with SpaeX, Tesla, PayPal and other business ventures—still do—but as a person, he’s a pathetic loser.

Now it seems like his main priority in life is to be King of the Trolls on Twitter. I kind of worry that he is losing focus on things I actually care about, like SpaceX and Tesla.

Here is one of the many news stories on the topic. https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets-algorithm-changes-twitter

let’s Stop eating the Jello people and get back to non political subjects.

 

[ThirstyBarbarian]

LOL. Exaggeration much? He dropped from number 1 to number 2 on the Forbes and other lists.

Really? I thought he had slipped down to number 7 or something. Maybe he just looks like number 7.

 

[rocket_troy]

Really? I thought he had slipped down to number 7 or something. Maybe he just looks like number 7.

Forbes say #2, although can't imagine Arnault sending any silver medals over... but... who knows...

TP

 

[ThirstyBarbarian]

Perhaps a 'media' company that isn't chasing profits for profits sake is good for America.

I find it ironic that many here bemoan networks for chasing the green now mock Musk for losing money on Twitter.

I don’t think I would classify Twitter as a media company similar to networks. It’s a social media company in which users create the content, not a media company that creates content on its own or purchases content to draw in an audience.

And I don’t think the fact it’s losing money is a sign of virtue. Plenty of media businesses lose money or even go bankrupt, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they were doing something good for the country. I’m pretty sure Musk didn’t buy Twitter with a plan to do something good for the country, even if he loses billions of dollars.

I think most of the mockery is about the fact that a lot of people think the Twitter purchase was stupid, and he went about the stupid purchase in the most dickish way he could, and he’s managed the company like an a-hole, and now it’s backfiring. And the current mockery has to do with the fact that the guy is such a special fragile snowflake, he had to have an engineering “fix” to prioritize his tweets over others. What kind of weirdo does something like that?

 

[ThirstyBarbarian]

let’s Stop eating the Jello people and get back to non political subjects.

This is not a political topic.

 

[georgegassaway]

 

[jderimig]

I don’t think I would classify Twitter as a media company similar to networks. It’s a social media company in which users create the content, not a media company that creates content on its own or purchases content to draw in an audience.

Twitter produce 99.9% of the content. Users just type characters in a box. Twiltter formats it, puts in electronic form and distributes it. No different than your local TV or radio music stations. Paramount is a media company who buys the creative work of others, packages it, distributes it and profits on that service. Twitter profits on the number of eyeballs that is viewing the content which it enables to be viewed. A media company.

Also news networks do not create the source content the world does that. But news network can select, highlight, suppress or shape how that content is delivered. Much like Twitter did before the Musk purchase. A media company.

 

[prfesser]

I agree, tweets like this are doing much to boost Elmo’s credibility . And they aren’t going to do much to attract top talent. Maybe he could smooth things over by referring to himself as a Very Stable Genius.

He IS a Stable Genius. Can shovel horses**t, cows**t, bulls**t, goats**t.... It matters not one whit, which creature dropped the s**t. Knows how to feed and water them, too. Can do it all. Within the walls of any stable or barn he has no peer.

 

[Funkworks]

I don't think so... there are plenty of YouTube videos showing the Supercharger cost and time. The last one I looked at said it was $19.90 for a 185 mile charge and it only took 45 min... Seems like a bit of a "profit" in there for Tesla.

Not sure what this means. Surely you and all governments do wish for a company to be profitable. When I rented a Model 3, it never took more than 30 min to charge 185 miles with a supercharger. You can try it for yourself with www.turo.com.

 

[Peartree]

The thing that makes the most sense to me is it’s a rich guy narcissist thing, not a savvy businessman thing.

Both are still possible. It wouldn't be the first time that a business pissed off a ton of people and made a crap ton of money doing it.