Comment by cyberphobe
2 years ago
And in the replies to this tweet he insists[1] "Elon is a smart guy" in spite of all the evidence to the contrary
2 years ago
And in the replies to this tweet he insists[1] "Elon is a smart guy" in spite of all the evidence to the contrary
Elon could both be smart and making huge mistakes. It happens all the time.
This is absolutely true. But I think “smart” leadership avoids repeatedly doubling down on their mistakes. You can, very rarely, double down on what looks like a bad bet and come out ahead. I’m not even sure I’d call that smart but it does happen. But it takes a not-smart person to see the losses stacking up over and over and decide to dig in their heels.
Even if you’re absolutely certain your goals and overall strategy are right a smart person would understand that something needs to change in the messaging and/or execution given the overwhelmingly negative feedback.
I really don't want to be defending Elon, but I think saying "Elon must be stupid because of how he handled Twitter" is as silly as "Elon had success with Tesla and SpaceX therefore he knows how to run companies". Those two seem like two extremes.
The answer seems more along the lines of, Twitter and its problems are very very different from Tesla/SpaceX, and while Elon may have been good at the latter, he has zero experience with the former.
That being said, not realizing the above I guess makes him partly not-smart, and I assume the shortsightedness was due to the inflated ego caused by his previous two successes.
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Elon's behavior, opinions, and points of view suggest otherwise. His only notable quality is his wealth.
For a classic example see former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. By any conventional measure he was very smart, and yet he made a series of catastrophically bad decisions which are still impacting US national security today.
Intelligence is overrated in leaders. Character, humility, principles, and discipline are far more valuable in avoiding huge mistakes.
It really depends on the organization being led. Vision is not something you can easily outsource or task subordinates with. I mean one of the classic leader types would never set himself up to fail in early days SpaceX.
What a startup, a market leader and a government organization need are distinct types of leadership. Sometimes there are prodigies who can do two of these. Musk did.
I think they are laying the groundwork to allow creators to monetize their tweets and additional content. As it stands a lot of creators are monetizing their content off platform (patreon, substack, youtube, onlyfans, etc.) and the goal is to lock them and their content into twitter.
I think it's a good idea as content is king, but they should have rolled this out after they had established an ability to monetize. Once people leave the platform it will be tough to get them back unless they offer a very lucrative comission split with creators.
Hoping they can restore brand safety to pull that off.
Yeah it's probably that, not that everyone is fleeing Elon's $44 billion dying platform and he's is trying to stop it in whatever way he can.
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Also, people can be both smart and stupid at different times and sometimes even at the same time. It's not a binary thing.
Elon is definitely not a smart human. Maybe 25 years ago he did a thing. Ok.
Intelligence is overrated for it's utility in navigating the world.
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Okay, so what's you over-under for Elon's IQ, or are you making a subtle distinction between intelligent and smart?
Someone can be both smart and Dunning-Kruger themselves in the face.
I don't know why someone who (self-diagnosed?) as having Asperger's thinks they'd be a good fit for leading a social media company, that feels like having a an amputee selling staircases [0]; but the rocket nerds I follow seem pretty convinced Musk genuinely knows actual rocket science.
[0] as in: it could work, but you'd not expect it by default
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He could be a dumb guy make much right. It happens all the time.
Elon is undoubtedly smart. It also seems like maybe he's on a mental health episode or just got so rich he decided he's done with building companies and just wants to be an asshole out of spite. Who knows? But he's accomplished plenty of things that suggest he's not an idiot.
He is smart, but smartness is overrated.
How do I know? Because I am pretty smart as well, with a PhD from math, but that didn't stop me from making a series of stupid mistakes in my life. Sometimes out of sheer optimism, sometimes because I missed some crucial information, sometimes because closeness to some other person made me miss important red flags, sometimes because I overextended my abilities, sometimes because I underestimated my adversaries.
If I bought Twitter, I would have run it into the ground in days.
do morons get accepted into Stanford's STEM PhD programs? You can hate Musk for his personality and maybe say he has mental health issues but to say he's stupid seems strange
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He can't alienate a big potential investor to future funds.
I think that, by leaving Twitter alone, he already has. If we've learned something about Elon so far, from previous episodes of the cursed news cycle we all inhabit, is that he's vindictive and petty to an irrational extent (calling rescue officers who don't agree with him pedophiles, banning journalists who report on the jet account, ...)
That relies on Elon still having a lot of funds to invest, not a foregone conclusion at this rate.
TikTok isn't on the list of banned social media links.
He's smart. He's also the last person on the planet that should be in charge of a social media platform.
Smart + deficient in the ethics department is a recipe for disaster.
I am not an Elon fan, but I agree Musk is a smart guy. I just don't think smartness on its own is very valuable. Indeed, it can be very dangerous when it lets you think that you know better than everybody else despite them having way more experience in their fields. A classic example is the XKCD cartoon "Physicists": https://xkcd.com/793/
I've met some incredibly smart narcissists, and you know what they use their smarts for? The same sort of continuous ego inflation that less smart narcissists do. Their smartness just makes things worse, because they're less likely to have the sort of comeuppance that leads to a moment of clarity.
Intelligence is neither a binary nor a one-dimentional concept. Within certain contexts Musk is certainly a smart entrepreneur but I would not call him that without a lot of such qualifiers.