Comment by mrtksn
2 years ago
You know how Musk promises one thing and delivers something else? I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person - that is understands what is a good product.
He will never deliver a free speech platform, he is a free-speech NIMBY and has an agenda os something that drives him but he can still turn Twitter into something valuable.
Then people will come back for whatever Twitter will become. But because he claimed free-speech absolutism he will be held accountable for it and his persona will degrade and people won't cut him a slack and that's the risk for him to fail completely. Until very recently he was able to get thousands of dollars of payment for a product that don't exists and he even jacked up the price over the years, many people are called frauds for less than this but Musk has huge social credit among the techies and He can continue selling that product and continue claiming that it will deliver next year - indefinitely.
He needs to figure out Twitter before his personality loses credit completely and losing the support of Paul Graham, a prominent persona from the scene, is not a good sign.
> I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person
What a weird thing to say after he killed twitter with his "process". Perhaps this dumpster fire is the best view yet into what he really believes, and how he really runs his companies. Elon is a modern day Kissinger
> Elon is a modern day Kissinger
You're going to have to elaborate on that fascinating historical reference.
His process as, I understand it, is to re-discover the wheel and see how else it could have been done. It is messy and might not yield good results if his predecessors already did a good job but I think he has a chance and will look like a dumpster fire until he learns and finds a new path. If he fails, it will look like extinguished dumpster fire :)
It's not a dumpster fire, its 5d chess!
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I wish it were not so, but Apple has shown you can get away with a whole truck of anticompetitive ‘no you may not hear about my competitor’ behavior without harming a business.
He could be, but I'm looking at Musk and seeing big Howard Hughes energy.
> You know how Musk promises one thing and delivers something else? I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person - that is understands what is a good product.
No, in the case of Twitter he clearly doesn't. Twitter's business model is advertising, yet he's been driving them away since he's started.
Even in the user-facing side he made a weird mess with the blue checkmarks that was completely unnecessary, didn't make anything better and only created confusion.
> Twitter's business model is advertising
That's true but as I've learned here on HN, that wasn't working very well already and Twitter was just an afterthought for the large advertisers. Twitter wasn't huge money maker.
That's something that he can change, this is not something fundamental about the product.
Yeah, but he's making it even worse.
Now one might argue that Musk wants to ignore advertisers entirely and target the actual users. That could be an interesting thing to try. But when why is he naming and shaming and whining about advertisers? If he decided to change business models, then it doesn't matter whether Apple advertises.
If he's aiming to profit from the users, he's also doing it wrong by bringing back all kinds of formerly banned unsavory people. This will over time reduce the market share to the very specific audience that's in line with his preferences, and probably invite trouble from the EU.
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> You know how Musk promises one thing and delivers something else?
He promises one thing and delivers a new promise for something else. Or a flamethrower.