In fact, I’d go further and say it was naïve about said vibes. I tried to watch that show recently and couldn’t specifically because it ignores all the deeper context of faschy dreams that we now know really underpins most of these tech companies. It’s like trying to enjoy a Mel Gibson movie now. I just can’t with everything we now know about who those people really are.
Playfully poking fun at the workplace culture of a company that is actively trying to destroy democracy today just ends up feeling retroactively tasteless.
If it’s not obvious he surrounds himself only with people who tell him what he wants to hear. He’s completely in his own bubble. That’s the Twitter he wants.
I have this idea that the only hypothetically enjoyable Mel movie is the one that was intended to be about Mel being an old and fucked up husk whose remaining skills are worthwhile only to give women a shot at success. But they chickened out and cast Tom Hardy.
(A good thing, too, perhaps, as it might well have rehabilitated him)
Wait…Avenue 5 is not the story of Twitter?
Captain is an incompetent buffoon that has never really captained
Crew and passengers doomed to a slow (or maybe very fast) death
Wild swings in policy, often accompanied by locking/unlocking areas of the ship (building)
Cannibalism
Exactly. Not meaning to go Godwin and all but…here’s a somewhat relevant quote from Albert Speer about you-know-who:
“That’s just the trouble,” said Speer, “like many people who have a smattering of reading in many fields, he thought he was an expert in all fields…he considered his opinion absolutely authoritative on all subjects because he too had once read a book.”
He is a silly little boy who likes to fiddle with things as long as they hold his interest and the people around him are all like “Ooh, look at that - what a clever boy!” Then he makes a mess and someone else has to clear up that mess. Rinse, repeat. Brains don’t even enter into this.
The resources are also finite and there’s only so much money can do. I have some friends who get paid VERY well for what they do and they’ve just about had it with their current pointy-haired boss who’s basically trying to put everything back to 2019 and it just doesn’t work. They know they can leave and find employment elsewhere and are weighing the annoyance factor of the change over the daily frustration.
Set it in an old people’s home run by Blackadder and Baldrick for the Melchett family.
All the others are residents, staff, doctors, contractors.
Blackadder tries constantly to rip everybody off and usually fails.
Imagine growing up in the belly of an emerald mine. Everyone else caters to your every need while your parents tell you that not only are you deserving of such servitude, but that you were in fact born to give these servants purpose. Without you they’d be lost, wandering souls void of purpose. You can see it in their eyes; the lack of prideful assurance that they are messianic figures, the surrender to their station because there was never any greater ambition. They need you to reassure them that their lives have purpose; to further the great genius you were bred for. They won’t benefit, but mankind will. The mankind composed of people like you… those others will be happy just to see their masters seize control of their destiny and know that they had some small, otherwise meaningless, part in it.
Billionaire’s syndrome? I mean, Musk may lean more to pretending technical knowledge than most, but he isn’t the only one who thinks being born into money makes him smart.
Alon Levy’s demolition job on Hyperloop starts with a related phenomenon and how it relates to Musk and the hype surrounding him.
There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it’s invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish ideas will invariably fail and end up working for him. If he cares about something, it’s important; if he says something can be done, it can. The people who are already doing the same thing are peons and their opinions are to be discounted, since they are biased and he never is. He doesn’t need to provide references or evidence – even supposedly scientific science fiction falls into this trope, in which the hero gets ideas from his gut, is always right, and never needs to do experiments.
His own engineering skills may be dubious, but I think the article is right that he is very focused on the technology part of Twitter. He recently demanded to actually see code from the engineers working on the platform (those who haven’t left the company already, that is). He is looking at the wrong thing. The bulk of their revenue is from advertising. Musk has never run a social media company or any company whose primary revenue is advertising.
And there’s the problem. Twitter doesn’t have its own specialized technology like Tesla or SpaceX or Hyperloop or Boring that makes magically run things. An engineer would understand this.
I guess at the time his reason “I need to travel quickly between the bay area and LA so I can see my children” seemed reasonable
Then we discovered that he has no interest in his offspring and they actively hate him (tbf - we know one does not want to be associated with him in anyway and I am assuming the others do or will end up hating him)
The purpose of Hyperloop was to undermine support for high speed rail in California by proposing an imaginary alternative that was better and cheaper.
Then there’s the Boring Company, which aims to build subways for cars.
Not for the first time.
It is in the awkward position of being both wrong and unoriginal: unoriginal because its mission of reducing construction costs from American levels has already been achieved, and wrong because its own ideas of how to do so range from trivial to counterproductive. It has good marketing, buoyed by the tech world’s desire to believe that its internal methods and culture can solve every problem, but it has no product to speak of. What it’s selling is not just wrong, but boringly so, without any potential for salvaging its ideas for something more useful.
