Comment by roland35
2 years ago
I'm sorry but saying "he is a smart guy" is a bit ridiculous at this point. A "smart guy" certainly may not know everything about running a social network, but he _would_ listen to the advice from those around them.
Being smart also means understanding what you don't know and not surround yourself with sycophants.
> but he _would_ listen to the advice from those around them.
At this point, I'm assuming he is surrounded by people too eager to please him.
> Being smart also means understanding what you don't know and not surround yourself with sycophants.
The inescapable conclusion is that Elon is not as smart as he thinks. Whether he can learn is open to debate and will become evident shortly.
> At this point, I'm assuming he is surrounded by people too eager to please him.
He definitely is. Or at least people pretending to.
I think this is one of the biggest risks of being too successful, too rich: it becomes too easy to surround yourself with people who will only agree with everything you say, and you end up believing in yourself too much, any criticism is jealousy, any contradiction is sabotage, and obviously you must really be so smart you can do anything, because look at all the people telling you so.
(Unrelated, but I think that's also what hurt the Star Wars prequels; Lucas was the legend. He either didn't get or didn't accept the constructive criticism that made the originals great.)
I have no inside info of Twitter besides being an interested bystander, but it seems like he's flat out ignored advice (and later fired the advice givers) at multiple points since taking over. I'm sure anyone left is only still around by being a yesman.
Smart and wise are related but somewhat orthogonal, Elon is quite smart but not very wise.
To expand on this: intelligence (smarts, IQ, etc) is the ability to come up with what appears to be the objectively best answer to a problem or action to take, often in a situation with only partial information.
Wisdom is the ability to evaluate many solutions to a problem or required action, and choosing the one which has the greatest utilitarian value, for some complex utility function that attempts to incorporate a far wider collection of evidence than intelligence does.
Somebody can be quite intelligent but lack wisdom. Intelligent people are also much better at self-delusion, and erection of reality distortion fields, than wise people. They are also prone to assuming that their intelligence transfers- for example between engineering and social media.
Hopefully, he'll shut down twitter sooner rather than later and then we won't have to listen to this ongoing blather.
Power and fame are intoxicating, moreso than any known chemical drug compound. Elon just didn't have the means to express this version of himself before his companies took off.