Comment by rapsey
4 years ago
Regarding 3. There are a whole lot of people projecting their desires on this situation and letting their dislike of Elon completely cloud their judgement and reasoning capacity.
What is going on at Twitter is the Musk modus operandi and he is almost certainly loving his time there right now. He put it all on the line at PayPal, Tesla and now Twitter. It's just extremely public this time. You can say he failed plenty and Twitter is probably just going to turn into one of those. But the user engagement right now is higher than ever and there is no reason it can not be turned into a profitable business. Twitter crashing and burning is wishful thinking more than reality.
"he is almost certainly loving his time there right now."
Certainly not. He loves the attention and power he has gained, but he certainly does not love the bad numbers (Tesla stock also went DOWN as well) and that the quite meaningless poll whether he should step down, was not in his favor.
He did not comment on that one with "Vox Populi Vox Dei".
> he certainly does not love the bad numbers (Tesla stock also went DOWN as well) and that the quite meaningless poll whether he should step down, was not in his favor.
The poll was just for show, and it was in his favour. The plan was always for him to be interim CEO, with reports going back throughout this year all the way to May about this. He keeps doing this – putting up polls where he’s already made the decision and knows the vote will just confirm it. Why do people keep falling for it?
The result of the poll was never meant to change his plans, but I doubt that the fact that majority of people wanted him out didn’t sting his childish thin-skinned ego.
My bet is that he was hoping the poll were overwhelmingly for him staying so that he can then eventually announce how “he must reluctantly step down and that he knows how everyone is disappointed by this terrible turn of events”.
"putting up polls where he’s already made the decision and knows the vote will just confirm it. Why do people keep falling for it? "
Except that he did comment those other staged polls with "Vox Populi Vox Dei" pretty much right away and put it into action vs. not commenting and no action on this one.
And he said many things, also that there will be no CEO on Twitter at all. But yes, he never intended to remain CEO - otherwise he would have never did the poll in the first place, but he definitely has no clear plan, he drives on sight. (And yes, in either case, he still owns Twitter.)
And "stepping down" translates to asking whether he was running Twitter well. And the people said "no".
Why would he want that?
What would be the benefit, if it was his plan, to make people wanting him go? You really think there is a great plan behind it?
The only vague thing might be to create an image of an reasonable emperor who listen to the people, even if it is unpleasant. But so far he does not really show the grandeur fitting that role.
Those are all weak reasons.
Musk was correctly anticipating a major down turn in the economy for 2022. He was saying this at the end of 2021. Of course Tesla went down, everything else did as well. This is not a surprise. Fun fact he and Thiel also correctly anticipated the dotcom crash before it happened and pushed for the last round of PayPal funding to get done quickly at the peak as they expected it to be the last opportunity.
Twitters poor financials were known going in.
I think he would need to be pretty dumb to be surprised or offended by the result of the poll. Being CEO or not is meaningless when it is a private company and he owns the place. His word is law no matter the CEO.
It's a bit weird to overpay for Twitter if you're expecting a downturn, no?
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It is really hard to argue that this is the best way to turn the company around. He might get lucky with a number of factors,and the level of addiction of twitter nerds can't be overstated, but losing so much of your engineering team is still a major risk. Also, given the fact that a lot of advertisers don't seem to be pleased, it is hard to imagine how they are going to translate higher engagement into higher revenue.
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