Comment by woah
3 days ago
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.
You are conveniently omitting his reason to buy it. Personal megaphone and shortly thereafter LLM training data are the simplest reasons.
Maybe he just spent a lot of time shitposting on there.
He did not want to buy it. He took an arrogant joke far enough that the Delaware Court of Chancery forced him to do it. He never wanted it earnestly.
Buying a 9.1% stake in a company before making an unsolicited (but formal) offer to buy out the rest of it is weird behaviour for somebody who didn’t actually ever want to buy it…
I think the GP is suggesting a simple explanation of why it went badly, since that is the subject of the thread, rather than an explanation of why Musk bought Twitter. No need for conspiratorial accusations of conveniently omitting anything.
> formerly-brilliant
When?
TBF going from the cobbled together roadster to actually mass producing cars was an accomplishment, as was giving his engineers the latitude to keep trying to land a Falcon 9 booster.
Then he started to think it was his brilliance that made those things successful. Cybertruck is his baby. So is Starship. He's telling his people to make it work with a little or no moderation of his concepts.
It’s not clear to me that he had any hand in the actual successes of Tesla and SpaceX. Stories abound of the lengths to which each company went to to manage his whims. He’s apparently burned through all of those firewalls and now both companies are exploding, figuratively and in literally.
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Wasn't elonjet the turning point? There are some arguments around that he might not have clear cognitive distinction between verbal accusations and physical violence. Maybe that was the missed shot from rooftop for him. Elon before those events was a Steve Jobs Junior figure, that is to say, he was not problematic enough for the rest of the world including myself to focus on the crazy side.
I'd love to hear why this is being downvoted? Not agreeing is one thing, but it seems like a reasonable thing to suggest?
> It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything that happens in the world is perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight.
Because the original comment isn't doing this. It's not talking about everything, it's talking about one specific thing in a very plausible scenario.
It wouldn't even need to be a very complicated or widespread "conspiracy": Just Musk and a few VC guys in a Signal or Telegram thread saying
> someone should just buy Twitter and downrank all these crazy leftists
> Hmm
> I'll help line up financing.
> Ok!
This isn't flat earth, chem trails, lizard people, or weather weapons. It's not even Illuminati, Masons, or Skull and Bones. We've seen some of these chats already.
Because Musk has provided abundant evidence of his political orientation over the last several years.
Witness his entire Boring Company being a sock puppet project to derail California's High Speed Rail system.
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He's provided evidence of being an impulsive fool for even longer. I defended Musk as a useful idiot for a while until be fully showed his true colors, but it has always been clear he's not a wise man.
(His vigorous and pathetic efforts to get out of the purchase also push against it being a big master plan, FWIW.)
> perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight
Is a strawman, to which the conclusion is also defied by the plain evidence of everything Musk has done on Twitter
You are missing the forest for one very odd tree. Yes, the tree is wacky, but
* Every private media company has beneficial owners * Those beneficial owners are rich * Rich people who own things for a living have incentives opposed to those of most people, who work for a living
These are not conspiracies, they are just basic facts of capitalism.
Better to put "facts" in quotation marks considering that is clearly a statement of opinion, and a fairly caricatured one at that.
That there are a select few who own the capital, and that those people generally do not overlap with the people who work, is more or less the original definition of capitalism. And I don't think its controversial or a caricature to imply that those two groups will have different incentives.
From Wikipedia [0]: `The initial use of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 ("What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others") and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 ("Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor")`
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Etymology
I haven't downvoted you, I am curious. Why do you disagree? In what relevant ways are their interests aligned?