Also PayPal turned out to be another right idea at the right time. Maybe that’s his talent? Picking which businesses to start? Those are three pretty big wins. It’s hard to deny that, much as I hate the guy.
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Yah fair enough. Even by that standard though, I feel like he’s done “well”. He basically managed to edgelord-tweet his way to being the richest man on earth and I can’t compute any of it.
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To be fair, he did not start Paypal, he started X.com, which did a couple of things PayPal needed and got bought by the company that would become PayPal, then Elon was forced out for insisting that their back-office run on NT rather than Linux. There were literally dozens of other companies doing what X.com was doing - Elon ending up at PayPal was a lucky break, as these things always are
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Three big wins seems like too many to be dumb luck, but then “how did the world’s richest idiot do so well” is pretty much asking for the bullseye fallacy. It means more to me that the only skill he’s shown since is entrancing weird nerds.
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Ah, okay, that’s very helpful context. Thanks! That actually makes me feel a tiny bit better about the world.
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Are you suggesting that Pfizer somehow concluded that it was not in their best interests to continue supporting a platform that amplifies conspiracy theories about their Soros/Gates Illuminati Child Groomer Nanobot Mind Control Vaccines?
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Well, at least they have autopilot to help them steer through the sobbing.
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In the unlikely event that I ever become obscenely wealthy, I’m going to hire a group of people, available around the clock, whose sole job is to tell me “Shut the fuck up asshole, that’s a stupid idea!” whenever I, ohhh, want to invest in a money pit or do something inherently evil.
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Just another piece of stupid evidence for my theory that we’re living in the stupid timeline, if you ask me. In the Star Trek universe you have the mirror universe, where Earth built a violent empire, but here in our reality, we at some point split off into a timeline of utter stupidity…
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Demanding Windows NT over linux for that kind of setting (arguably, any kind of setting, but let’s not go there)?
That’s a big fuckin’ red flag right there.
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Yeah, I’m trying to figure out how I ended up in this time fork. I can’t be sure, but I think it involved a late night run to Del Taco.
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I think maybe someone here theorized that our shift into the stupid timeline corresponds with the Large Hadron Collider in Europe… which was in 2008… 
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IIRC that applies to Tesla as well.
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Yes, also true, but fewer people are aware of how irrelevant to PayPal he actually was
SpaceX he did at least found but Tom Mueller is the non-money reason that SpaceX exists - not Elon
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At least as goes Telsa the problem is that his loans from his backers are guarenteed by his Telsa shares.
If he doesn’t hit the required profit marks, and can’t pay back the loans. Then they can take control of Telsa.
There’s a pretty good possibility that leads to all your value extracting shit like layoffs, leveraging it to the gills. And eventually parting it out. Especially if it’s WILDLY over valued stock doesn’t stay wildly over valued though the mess.
Advertising reach sure.
But it only takes a cursory glance at any news source to see how embedded it’s become. Not only does practically every media venue constantly report by, through and on twitter. But look at how central it’s become to politicians messaging directly to the populace. The POTUS twitter account is legitimately important as goes bully pulpit, just to pick one big hot potato.
It’s also a core part of the hustle for a lot of media and performance workers and freelancers. Comedians, journalists, podcasters, TV writers. And through the same means it’s become weirdly important for print and web media operations in terms of distributing works.
A lot of the outsized focus on Twitter comes out of how central it is in these particular bubbles. So they’re going to act as if it’s important to all of us, because it’s important to all of them.
But Twitter’s big businessy problem is an absolute failure to turn any of that influence into a way to make money. Or ever make a case that anyone who isn’t involved in that sort of promotion should have anything to do with them at all.
Twitter is ads. Almost every Tweet you’ve ever seen is at minimum some form of self promotion.
But they built a thing that’s all about doing that yourself, and for free. And there’s not a ton of money in selling ads to run against ads.
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Musk may have been justifying his takeover of Twitter based on the notion of “free speech” but it’s been pretty clear that this is a dog whistle for the notion that it’s a bad thing that with the actual content moderation it’s implemented in the past few years, Twitter has become a haven for lefty/progressive/marginalized people and not a place where racist trolls can freely operate. Musk, of course, as an edgelord troll himself, finds this situation intolerable.
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He seems to think a party that’s threatening to investigate and punish companies that invest in green energy will be good for his electric car and solar panel company.
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There appears to be evidence that advertisers were leaving the platform long before he took over. In fact they were leaving almost as soon as he made his offer to buy Twitter. (And when it looked like he might manage to back out of the deal, there was a slight uptick in new ads. Wow, I wonder what that means. /s)
(non pay-walled link)
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/politics-musk-and-brand-safety/sharetoken/bgus2K56RdzG
(from the link, highlights mine.)
" …any advertiser is spooked by a platform that is firing half its staff on two days notice. (The real “product” of any social media network is its moderation.) But set all that aside. Musk is unable to grasp that the fighting and impulsive outbursts themselves make Twitter radioactive for most advertisers. Yesterday he began threatening that if major American brands didn’t cut it out he’d do a “thermonuclear name & shame” against them. Needless to say, no advertiser wants to get anywhere near a platform or publication where the CEO might publicly go apeshit on your brand out of the blue because of some adjustment you made in your ad spend. This is completely terrifying to any advertiser. Indeed, even “terrifying” doesn’t quite capture it. They don’t need to be terrified. There are plenty of places to advertise. Would you rather go to the supermarket where it’s calm and friendly or the one where the manager might come out and bawl you out for no apparent reason in front of your family?"
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Holy crap. I did that when I was a kid. Didn’t realize it was so widespread.
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