Arrogance. He thought he could BS his way through because he thinks he’s the smartest person in the room.
You’re still assuming he’s a rational person. He isn’t.
In my experience running (much smaller) tech companies, one of the joys of the position is getting the opportunity to learn from people who are a lot smarter and more talented in their own subject areas than I could ever be. If one actually listens to them, answering high-level questions like this in a non-BS way becomes a lot easier.
Musk’s technical ignorance would explain why, having shed 70% of Twitter’s workforce, including whole engineering teams, he thinks that he can go out and “just hire more”.
Leaving aside that hiring new engineers is a slow process that consumes everyone’s time, including the time of engineers you’d rather have working on new features (ask me how I know), Musk has missed an important detail. Twitter uses Scala, which is a relatively little-used programming language. So to fulfill his dreams, he needs to go out and find a lot of highly-skilled engineers with experience using Scala in high-performance environments. Those aren’t easy to find.
There’s one company in the space that historically had a very high concentration of some of the world’s best Scala engineers. If you wanted to get really good Scala developers, you’d probably have to try to hire away some of their people. That company? Twitter.
So the answer to the question “Where can we find great Scala engineers?” is “You had them already, you lumbering cretin. And you drove them away and they’re NOT COMING BACK.”
It would have been great if he responded to “who are you?” with “I’m a software engineer, are you?”.
The key, I found, is in having the intelligence to know which of their soundbites to crib (and which to leave well alone) and to always test my understanding by turning their complex gobbledegook (to me) into analogies. If I could do those things, I could get away with answering all sorts of questions I had no right to answer.
A large part of the work is doing just that: explaining the grand vision in a compelling way to both laypeople and experts. That Musk couldn’t articulate on a broad level what makes the technology stack so “crazy” or answer whether the solution would be more reform or revolution shows how over-hyped his reputation as a tech visionary is.
The audio is a bit confusing to me, I don’t recognize voices well enough to know who is talking when. The fact that Musk does not know what he is talking about is nothing surprising - it is now common for any kind of CEO to throw around buzzwords without any understanding.
But what was super chilling to me was how a simple, matter-of-fact question is met with “you are a jackass” and other attempts to stop the person asking the question. Not even trying to bullshit his way out of the question - just straight to shameless attacks and people are fine with that?
I mean, every time I see Elon’s fanbase in action, it is scary, but hearing it in audio instead of seeing their silly twits is much scarier.
This is more of Musk laying the groundwork of blaming someone else.
“I couldn’t make Twitter profitable because the damned engineers wouldn’t take my advice and start over with a blank slate”.
Much like he tried to use the prevalence of bots as an excuse to try to weasel out of his $44B cluster f*sk.
Elon has a peculiar off-british accent that I guess comes from being rich anglo south african.
There are little volume indicators next to their names in the video which show who’s talking at any given moment.
You may well be right about the presence of bro-grammers at Twitter (certainly in the post-Muskrat era, if the photographic evidence is to be believed). But even I, a non-developer casual, know that “rewrite the stack” is an exercise doomed to catastrophic failure – both from a systems theory perspective and from software case studies that go into the gory details.
Anyone with a modicum of experience in large-scale software product management would be right to laugh in the face of someone who suggested “a total rewrite” without presenting reams of evidence that it was an absolute necessity.
Elmo’s finally reached the echelon of greybeards who are more enamored with “being right” than with “being rich.” The tenacity of a full stack developer who’s been told that his baby is ugly (by an idiot with a world’s biggest bullhorn) knows no bounds.
Goodness, he’s just luckier than Elizabeth Holmes.
I think by “their” you’re implying that Musk’s fans called the guy a jackass. Those weren’t Musk’s fans. That was Musk.
Yeah, I get it now. And it was also him with “Who are you?” Creepy.
And the host repeating “Keep my space civil…” when there was nothing uncivil about the questions.
Why not both? Sort of a double-shot of ignorance and ego tucked right underneath the chin.
I think the host was acutely aware of Musk’s fragile ego and was referring to the other participants not being properly deferent when challenging his bullshit.
An obligatory gif to break up all the techbro virtue signaling:
My uninformed opinion on this whole “futurist” nonsense shtick is that they’re all too isolated from the general population of humans who exist - right now - to be able to make any meaningful connections, so any ideas they have are rooted in nonsensical bullshit or have no basis in reality.
For example, I was on board with Grimes taking Zuck to task on how he, in particular, cannot possibly create a viable VR metaverse because he doesn’t understand people.
Then I read an interview where she and another artist in a similar milieu (Santigold?) were chatting about how they’d just learned that gold is an element and that scientists can’t “make” more.
If you don’t have a grasp of middle school science, I’m not real keen on listening to you wax poetic about guiding humanity into “our next phase” because right now Our Next Phase looks real fucking dumb.
Peter Thiel is not wrong, but also takes one to know one.
This is a good breakdown of Musk and others in this vein: Moving Fast and Breaking Things.
