OPINION | Silicon Valley is not a superhero incubator. Its leaders are not gods. Many of them aren’t even geniuses. The longer we remember this, the better we’ll be at preventing history from repeating itself again. And again. And again. https://t.co/70jDG6C6QL
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) November 24, 2022
… A Nov. 21 New York Times piece claims that this is just Elon Doing Elon, running Twitter the same way he ran Tesla and SpaceX in the early days. While the reporters express a healthy skepticism that this approach will work at a company as different as Twitter, they also leave it to the realm of possibility that this is all part of a playbook that has worked before and may work again.
Meanwhile, while Musk isn’t saying much to the media, he certainly is Tweeting Through It, breaking shit and claiming I meant to do that—flipping his L’s around and sticking them together, telling us they’ve been W’s all along. (Elon, those are clearly L’s. We can see the Scotch tape.)…
Of course, expansion and contraction are inevitable regardless of the industry. But there’s something more going on with what we’re seeing across tech right now. It feels bigger than the gentle waving of the Invisible Hand. It looks like a bunch of guys who were heralded as geniuses, then made a bunch of bad calls, and now reality is finally catching up to them…
this is very, very good. you should read it. I’m pretty set on a theory where there’s an impending clash between the two main classes of billionaires – the quiet lurkers, and the noisy maniacs. the quiet lurkers are very unhappy about the noisy maniacs upsetting the apple cart. https://t.co/MIRuH7OTAV
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) November 23, 2022
… Those of us who have been questioning reality in the last year – pointing at things that seem stupid and saying “hey, isn’t that really dumb?” have had the grim edification of watching bad ideas that suck get punished. Elon Musk has had the chance to show us what decades of business acumen have meant for Twitter – by which I mean a continually chaotic stage play where a 56-year-old billionaire is humiliated thousands of times a day as he runs a company into the ground. Musk restored twice-impeached retiree Donald Trump over the weekend based on a poll of users, only for Trump to keep his promise that he wouldn’t be returning to the platform, leading to several embarrassing posts where Musk attempted to act as if Trump was desperate to placate a Twitter addiction he’d long since shed…
… The regular people I talk to – those who are not continually shoving their head in the online septic tank – generally view Twitter as a dying business run by a giant child. The exterior view of Musk has changed from “guy with electric cars and rockets” to “Rich Guy Having Mental Health Crisis,” something more approaching a contestant on a terrible reality show than a cool business guy that they want to see win.
Open Thread: The Myth of <del>No Fingerprints</del> the Tech TitansPost + Comments (52)