Comment by sorcerer-mar
3 days ago
It's weird that you say both she had no material power and also seem to imply the valuation drop and lawsuits were due to her ineptitude?
Anyway she volunteered to be a puppet for a man who is clearly off the rails and her legacy will forever be stained.
Both things can be true: Valuation did drop during her tenure, AND she was not to blame.
Therefore the praise is weird, because she seemingly neither helped nor hurt the business.
One would imagine that a CEO lacking power is the precise reason a company would perform poorly.
Indeed. It was such a paradoxical situation from the start, with her both reporting to Musk as the chairman and owner, while at the same time "managing" him as the CTO. I'm surprised that the charade went on for as long as it did.
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Elizabeth Holmes had all the power. Also being competent matters.
> she was not to blame.
Fall guys bear some of the blame in the fall.
My long-held [0] personal theory - borne out by everything Musk has done, and by who bought Twitter - is that it was bought to curb the possibility of large positive social movements along the lines of OWS or BLM.
Enabling that can entail being useless at your supposed job, while doing your actual job (which deserves some amount of blame, from a number of perspectives).
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36685384
I think Elon truly believed in the subscription model, which would free him from advertiser content influence. That and being terminally addicted to the platform himself, and being an impulsive gambler. I really don't think we've gotten where we are due to any (successful) master plan
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See my only counterpoint to this theory is Musk has a long and well documented history of being absolutely stone desperate to be cool, which is the only thing he can't buy, and he simply revels in his ownership of Twitter even as he comprehensively runs it into the ground as a business.
Now, would he be upset about such efforts being derailed as a result, or is he even slightly bothered about his website now being packed to the tits with Nazis? Absolutely not. But I do think as unbelievably cringe as it would be if true, I really think he bought the damn thing because he just wanted to be the meme lord.
Mainly I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning. He's an overgrown man-child.
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It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything that happens in the world is perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight. Maybe a formerly-brilliant but drug-addled rich guy just bought a social media platform with bad fundamentals at the height of its valuation and then mismanaged it while flailing around with other ventures and political adventures. Occam's razor.
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Pretty good theory
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hmm... I am drawing a parallel between your theory on 'controlled opposition' from the linked thread from 2023, to the current M vs T fight. Plausible...
Thing is, she failed at being the fall person. It's clear to everyone who was calling the shots, so ironically she was ineffective as the fall person.
My conspiracy theory was that because of Musk's involvement in OpenAI he had foreknowledge of the impeding release of ChatGPT. In that context, Twitter as a source for AI training can be far more valuable than a rage filled social network. However he still failed horribly to time the market
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Nothing positive can come out of Twitter for McLuhanite reasons.
Zohran Mamdami's greatest attribute in media is that if you see him in video you see him listening to people. Even people who aren't inclined to agree with him talk to him and say "he was so nice, he listened to me." High-D [1] billionaires who support High-D candidates such as Clinton, Cuomo and Adams are driven crazy by this. [2]
Even though Twitter does provide a back channel and a Twitter user may really be a nice guy who listens and replies, the structure of the thing is such that you don't see that user listening and in fact the user interface on Twitter makes it really hard to see that conversation for outsiders in the way that the heavy Twitter user doesn't get. Not least because the heavy Twitter user might not realize that people who aren't logged in don't see anything at all (pro tip: just don't post links to Twitter on HN, you might see a great discussion with a lot of context, the rest of us just see a single sentence floating in space without any context)
On video though, the person who listens listens visibly, you see the microexpressions in real time as they react to what the other person is saying. It's a thing of beauty. (Coalition leaders such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Peloci do a lot of listening as part of their job but constituents only see them talking!)
The above is a second order concern compared to the general compression of discourse in Twitter which is talked about in [2]. Twitter addicts spend 4-5 hours a day traversing graphs to follow discussions and understand (or think they understand?) context, the rest of us just see "white farmers" which means one thing if you're racist, another if you're "anti-racist", and just means "move along folks, nothing more to see here" for the great silent majority. When Twitter is at equilibrium every movement creates and equal and opposite amount of backlash, nothing actually changes except polarization increases, there is more and more talking and less and less listening, and the possibility of real social change diminishes.
Burn it down.
[1] https://darkfactor.org/
[2] for once good NYT content that isn't paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...
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[flagged]
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I don't think she is entirely to blame, but I think there is some blame for not standing up to Musk and leading better.
> I think there is some blame for not standing up to Musk and leading better.
That seems in the same category as saying there's some blame on her for not working harder on basketball in her youth and so never becoming a WNBA Finals MVP. (Narrator: Um, no, she's not nearly tall enough ....)
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GP is specifically responding to
> Remarkably inept.
She did exactly what she was hired for. The plan was terrible, but she executed it as well as expected. It's hard to see any ineptitude.
She shut her mouth and didn’t cause trouble.
It is possible that people think that the valuation would be even worse if she wasn't the CEO. Unlikely, but possible.
> Valuation did drop during her tenure
Valuation also bounced back during her tenure.
No idea why the truth is being downvoted so heavily ? X is valued at $44 billion by the financial times as of March 2025.
> her legacy will forever be stained
Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?
> Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?
I know you meant your comment as sarcasm, but to do it, you need to have a legacy worth those kind of numbers to begin with, instead of selling your labor as most of us here do. It's not so different that celebrities associating themselves with brands through advertising.
And as distasteful as it seems to many of us, people like her spend years building their social networks and a reputation for various personality and behavioral traits in a boardroom.
Also, I doubt her legacy is closed at this point. The traditional next step would be to write a book based on her career capped off by her experiences at Twitter.
Sounds like a snooze.. But maybe someone will pay to not take chances.
My question is where does she go from here?
Like if she became my CEO, I'd really worry about my company/job.
Lots of corporate boards, university boards, nonprofit boards, etc. make room for folks like her. She understands something about social media and the digital future -- and even if that expertise doesn't impress many folks on HackerNews, it will seem quite sufficient and robust to the elderly trustees and big-donor board members of Pleurisy State University.
Being 62 is the perfect age for such roles. Young enough to climb a flight of stairs; old enough to nod appropriately to her new peers' references from the 1980s. Executive search firms will be eager to guide her into as many board roles as she might want.
Depends on how likely you think it is she's a puppet CEO for a drug crazed, edge lord, owner or if she'll actually be allowed to do the job.
She’s 62 years old. She can just retire.
Invest the 6mil and enjoy a carefree life?
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With the tens of millions she made does she even need to go anywhere?
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To some other founder/acquirer that wants to maintain control while putting somebody else in the seat.
You're acting like Elon is uniquely stupid.
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Politics! Or maybe management consultants. Lots of consulting jobs are really just about taking the blame.
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Failure can teach you a lot if you're willing to learn.
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I will do it for half that price....
Don't wait. Pick up your phone and Call Elon right now as this position is filling up fast.
Meta
What legacy?
She's not a well known public figure. She ran the ad department at NBC. Is now very rich and at age 61, close enough to retirement age.
Do you not think someone who ran the ad department at NBC has a reputation?
"Legacy" doesn't mean "guy-on-the-street's perception of you."
?? I don't guess a guy on the street would have ever spared a thought for the head of NBC's ad department.
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That's exactly what it does mean. If you're not famous, you have no legacy.
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If you have enough money, any age can be retirement age. The whole concept of "retirement" is really for the working class anyway.
The way I see it, her job had two parts - reign in Elon, and then run the show. But she couldn't (or wasn't interested in) doing the first part, and so her tenure was a failure. Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX does a great job at both, by contrast.
Shotwell is amazing. She runs SpaceX, which is rocket science, and she has to manage Musk, which is harder than rocket science.
There's a market for CEOs that are "puppets" or managed by another CEO. In that way I doubt her reputation is necessarily stained as anyone making that much money lives in a different world and under different terms than (presumably) you and I do.
Oh sure, I have no doubt she can get another cushy job if she wants it. I just mean that she has revealed herself as a coward at best, and a deplorable snake at worst.
No, she's just helping to sculpt the glass cliff.
She was hired to perform stunt, a nose-dive with the company.
Folks hired for something like that aren’t in it for “legacy”.
> It's weird that you say both she had no material power and also seem to imply the valuation drop and lawsuits were due to her ineptitude?
Why is that weird? Say you have a company operating normally. The CEO dies and isn't replaced. Do you think it's weird for the company's value to drop?
Perhaps if there was success she would have had no material power and not have been responsible for the success.
(1) She had no power
(2) If she did have power, nothing good happened during her tenure, so what would she even be thanked for?
I'm not suggesting she should be thanked. I'm suggesting that the failures listed are hard to ascribe to her ineptitude.
Right but the point was:
> *I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her* but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.
What was there to thank her for?
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> her legacy will forever be stained
I would like to believe that people can change over time.
She had one job, and that was to get Musk to keep his fucking mouth shut, at which she failed spectacularly.
well, yes. but she now has a much enriched resume
You may not like Elon Musk but he's doing remarkably well for someone who is "clearly off the rails".
Yes, corruption pays. Although if "doing remarkably well" means being addicted to ketamine, having many exes and children who refuse to speak with you, tanking multiple businesses to the point that your products get sabotaged just for being associated with you, getting booed off stages, licking the boots of fascists in the hope they'll let you call them "daddy", paying people to play online games for you to impress nerds (unsuccessfully, instead getting online-bullied for it), etc., etc., then I think I'd rather not "do remarkably well", thank you very much.
Elon does not seem like a happy man. Is money the only points humans score themselves by? It's like watching someone bragging about getting the highest ever score at a game that they hate.
> licking the boots of fascists in the hope they'll let you call them "daddy"
Which fascists?
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I’ve never seen so many political talking points packed into one HN comment.
You have a distorted view or reality. Elon seems pretty happy to me and is undeniably successful in business - arguably the most successful entrepreneur of our time. I don't know much about his personal life but I suspect that him having babies with multiple women is due to personal choices rather than a sign of misfortune. He certainly doesn't seem "off the rails" to me. That said, I can understand that his lifestyle is not for everyone.
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Like, financially? Sure. I don't think that was ever in dispute.
In what sense is he "off the rails" then?
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Elon Musk is doing well now the same way Elvis Presley or Howard Hughs were doing well in their final years.
I think Bernie Made-Off is a better comparison. It will all come crashing down
[dead]
No he isnt.
Tesla is going to down the shitter and he is trying to fool everyone that it suddenly is now an AI company lol with a disaster rollout for his taxis. Waymo is going to eat them for lunch. Driverless taxis with people overseeing things in the car lol Wow. Such autonomy. He also didnt even create the company. He basically stole it from some other guys who actually founded and built the early stages of tesla.
He doesnt and isnt capable of running SpaceX. Their current CEO and tech lead is the person who runs the business and is actually knowledgable in the space industry and space engineering. Elon? Oh he just is there for the launches.
His neuralink and xAI? lol Ok. Yes Im sure we will see a lot coming out of those businesses with most government and people know shunning his business's and himself. Oh and new version of a nazi LLM. Cant wait to use it. And Twitter. Wow so much great discourse and sensible conversation that it competes with truth social.
Yes, he is doing remarkably well because he has money. Just like Pablo escoabr had money. The leaders of Enron were also doing remarkably well for a while. What about the guy who ran that ponzi scheme? Maddof. Yes he was also doing remarkably well since no one knew the bullshit he was generating. Elon is a fraud like all these other successful people who may have created businesses but hide the bullshit well for now. One day though, it will all come crashing down. Then you and all other sheep will look like greater fools than you do now. You still have time to come to your senses. Just dont be a sheep and glorify any man or exalt him above others. Its quite simple. He is no genius. He is someone who takes advantage and exploit others for his personal gain and is more destructive to society today than he has ever been and people like you are contributing to it so congrats to screwing over other people.
> her legacy will forever be stained
Interesting. My hot take is 99% of the time non-founder CEOs end up on the dustbin of history, successful or unsuccessful.
Terry Semel. John Akers. John Sculley, Carly Fiorina. Except among those of us in tech, all are now long forgotten failures. Even Gil Amelio, who made one of the most genius acquisitions ever, was fired and his name lost to the sands of time. My bet is nobody's going to remember Tim Cook or Sundar or Satya in 50 years, maybe even 20.
Possibly the only non-founder CEO who has made a real legacy in the last 100 years is Elon. I would also say TJ Watson Jr. but I very much wonder if that many HN commenters know who he is!
I think the founders tend to have a love for the business and a long-term plan for it. Followup CEOs are more about the stock performance and happy to sell it for parts if it serves their bonus. Sundar and Satya took all of the strengths of those respective companies and burned them to the ground. Made a lot of money doing it, stockholders love them, but they're pale husks of their former businesses.
Really good call out. Hitting someone from above & below seems not quite square.
In my view, there was plenty of opportunity to make a mark & do things, even with a ultra involved Musk.
But this person didn't bring much product leadership, didn't have a vision for the product. Having good business relationships might have been its own core competency, but whether Linda's fault or no, suing and going after businesses to try to score some vengeance for your own terrible behavior, and maybe coerce some people back: that's a terrible tactless look, that one would hope a leader like Linda could have helped steer away from.
I don't think this is what was happening. It's weird that people are thanking her when she functionally did nothing of value while the company has been spiraling. Either she was complicit in the whole thing, or she really did nothing at all. In either case, what is there for the users to thank?