I think this Twitter thread is along the same vein but adds on to that explanation:
Elon’s first irreversible fuck-up happening at this point:
Short version: He doesn’t think they’ll take the offer, but they do and he’s stuck, his Dunning-Kruger kicks in and he thinks he can “fix” the site, but…
His notion of what’s wrong and how to fix it don’t match up with, say, the users or advertisers, he gets increasingly desperate, he’s throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks, that just makes everything worse, etc.
I saw a thread by a former Twitter engineer, who had been there for many years and was quite invested in the place, but ultimately left because Musk never remotely articulated what “Twitter 2.0” was going to be, and some of the rumored possibilities were not good. Musk apparently promised to reveal his vision to anyone who stayed (and made themselves ineligible for any kind of future severance package), as a kind of loyalty test, but apparently the number of die-hard Musk fan-boys willing to go along with that was pretty minimal, understandably.
In particular I notice programmers who think, “I am a mighty genius in my field, I’ve accomplished things no one else has!” but ignore the fact that their particular field only existed starting shortly before they first got into it (or only became relevant at that point) and they were one of no more than a couple dozen people working in the field at most. They don’t recognize how low-hanging the fruits they picked really were, but from that experience they have this notion that they can also accomplish similar things in any other field that’s existed for, say, centuries (and has had thousands upon thousands of people seriously working in it). Doubly true when the other field is a “lesser field” of knowledge.
(This thinking I find especially funny in fields such as the arts, where they don’t realize that there’s even something to know in the first place, don’t get it, and therefore conclude that it must be stupid.)
Boy, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the '90s and (gestures broadly) the techno-utopian naivety of it all… thinking back on the discourse, I’m shaking my head a lot because whoo boy it comes across different now.
