Perhaps because disrupting things was the actual goal, rather than saving money. DOGE was highly effective in harming the entities meant to oversee Musk's companies, stealing information about union organizing and labor complaints, reducing the government's ability to collect taxes, and destroying its regulatory capacity.
Well, for Twitter it's fine. It's a private company, and the shareholders can only blame themselves for the management they put in charge.
(From a broader society point of view, I'm a bit sad that they didn't actually manage to run Twitter into the ground. I think Twitter's a net-negative for humanity. But that's a different topic. People obviously like using it.)
The things that make social media net-negative--advertising, infinite scroll, global scale--aren't part of HN. Facebook wasn't net-negative when it was just a website that a few million people used to post semi-publicly with their community.
Once content begins being served by algorithm social networks start taking a nose dive in terms of quality and user experience and they slowly spiral into lowest common denominator smut. It juices engagement and therefore advertising dollars for a time, but slowly half of users start to recognize the vapidness of it all and disengage for good.
Hacker News is paginated, but effectively infinite, too. Though I guess that's enough of a UI friction to make a difference?
How is it not global scale? Or do you mean it only target a specific slice of your life (even if it makes not much of a difference where on the globe you are)?
Musk is uniquely stupid and arrogant for refusing to understand very complex systems before making radical changes to them. This behavior directly led to outages at Twitter after he bought it.
I do think Musk correctly identified excess staff and irresponsible spending, but where he screwed up was being his toxic self which drove away even more of the audience and almost every big advertiser.
Musk fired people before understanding what they did at Twitter. The best example is how he fired a Twitter employee who criticized him but it turned out to be the owner of a company Twitter bought and he had enormous legal protection and when Musk found this out he was suddenly much nicer to him.
It was staffed with walking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who knew very little about the departments or the work that they were cutting but enough to assume they knew more than people who had spent their life working there. That requires a special level of arrogance. They went in with the idea that all of these people at this organization are lazy and stupid and so everything they didn’t understand must be a result of one of those things or the other.
Why wouldn't Peter Principle apply just because the magical financial threshold is crossed? This is Peter Principle in a textbook way, a promotion from managing companies to managing the government.
my original thesis is wrong - while musk may have petered up to the top, that doesnt imply his actions must also be attributed to stupidity. the error in the thesis is conflation of stupidity with the raw brutal strength of cancer
> Unlike the Peter principle, the promoted individuals were not particularly good at any job they previously had, so awarding them a supervisory position is a way to remove them from the productive workflow.
> An earlier formulation of this effect was known as Putt's Law (1981), credited to the pseudonymous author Archibald Putt ("Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.").
They said they only sold around 5000 of the trucks in the quarter. Was only responding to the stuff about Cybertruck. It seems like a material portion of its sales are to his own other company.
I like how in today’s world and especially when it comes to Musk things cannot be as simple as incompetence. It has to be some 4D chess move. Like a reverse Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which might be/maybe/perhaps explained by 4D chess move. It’s like 4chan leaking all over the Internet. And Musk can keep his genius legacy alive.
is it really 4D chess to imagine that a man under investigation by the federal government would desire to benefit from being given express permission to reduce force and efficacy of agencies directly threatening him?
I don't think Musk having bad faith intent shows him to be intelligent, more just greedy and selfish, but I think it's actually more irresponsible to believe that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing
That falls under “dishonest stuff companies do all the time”. Unless there are major political points to be scored by nailing him (which there may be now, don’t get me wrong), this would get a slap on the wrist. The cars do drive themselves, they have for awhile, Tesla never claimed it was perfect, they only claimed it would be perfect in the near future and musk plausibly could have (delusionally) thought this so there is no case (not saying he isn’t dishonest, though, that’s just not how the legal system works).
So I don’t think being looked at for the kind of stuff many companies do all the time explains <checks notes> infiltrating the government and personally disrupting the people investigating him, in public. If he’s worried about a financial hit, souring Tesla’s reputation as he has is obviously not worth it. If he’s worried about prosecution, surely he would be better off being nice to everyone in politics, not pissing anyone off and strongly supporting choice causes off the mainstream radar that happen to be in the interest of politicians.
So if he is doing it on principle, he just needs to be hubristic and reckless and possibly very autistic. If he is doing it to mess with the people investigating him, he needs to be outright stupid.
Hubristic and reckless (and autistic) are much, much more realistic adjectives for Musk than “outright stupid”. I know a lot of people will just assert that he is stupid, but if you yourself are sufficiently intelligent and you listen to the guy talk for a long time, you can at least tell he isn’t stupid. You can tell because he doesn’t do the rhetorical things stupid people need to do in order to mask contradictions or logical holes in what they are saying. They always do it. Even smart people sometimes do it quite a bit, like Steven Pinker for example m. Musk very rarely does it, and when he does it’s so completely obvious you can tell he’s bad at it and didn’t get where he is by being good at it.
It's not 4D chess to hurt the agencies that regulate and investigate you. It's the opposite of 4D chess. There is no secret plan, not conspiracy theory, no clever chess move.
I don't think that's right - although of course we are speculating about what's happening inside the head of Musk.
Musk strikes me as an juvenile and naive man, precisely the kind of man that would take a hatchet to a complex system while believing he is competently reforming. His experience with taking over Twitter probably reinforced his belief that you can move fast and break organisations and, despite all the moaning from liberals, nothing bad will happen in the end.
So Musk is exactly the man to honestly believe in what he was doing, and he was immersed in a right wing echo chamber, which for 50 years has been talking about government waste.
Don't ascribe to malevolence what can be explained by incompetence.
The idea that he is “stupid” or “naive” while also being the world’s wealthiest man by far needs to die
What he really is is a sociopath who uses the idea of “doing good” to infiltrate systems and setup laws and legal structures that benefit him and his companies
I don’t buy any of the goody-two-shoes “for the sake of humanity” persona and neither should you. But the worst thing you can do is dismiss his sociopathy as naivete or stupidity
Again, though, do you think that there’s some concrete goal he was aiming for which he could have achieved if only he hadn’t fired and insulted them? Or do you just think that it was terribly rude and they didn’t deserve to be treated that way? I wouldn’t call the latter stupidity, especially since he was working against contemporaneous predictions that the site wouldn’t be able to function without those people.
He did try to get out of buying it which everyone seems to have memoryholed. I doubt anything other than way too much ketamine is behind a lot of the chaotic decision making.
This was years in the making. He basically made a $200 million bet on the USG, one that translated into hundreds of billions. This was all calculated, and the veneer of government inefficiency was good enough to mask his actual objectives.
I can say this confidently because that's what I would have done too, and I'm not half as smart as him (given that I haven't built a Paypal or a SpaceX myself). That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done. The upside to doing it that way was just that much massive.
Smart doesn't work like that. I have little doubt that you are as "smart" as Elon.
Usually what people mean when they say "smart" is actually more like meaning of the word "canny," which helps explain the distinction. A canny decision is one that makes you look smart in retrospect.
To put it another way, I might climb to the top of a hill. Climbing the hill doesn't make me taller, but it does get me the benefits of being able to see everything for miles around.
Perhaps after climbing a hill/Ent I see Saruman's army marching off to war, and realize that even though I may be a halfling, right now I could say a particular thing that would be "as the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains." This is a canny moment, and like any canny moment or is filled with surreal possibility. But it isn't because Meriadoc is a tall hobbit and, not because only a tall person could do this thing that involves seeing a great distance.
Musk knows nothing about rocket design and has very little to do with SpaceX, which is a big reason it is actually successful. If Musk actually TRIED to design a rocket it would go about as well as the CyberTruck because he would just ignore all advice from anyone who actually know how to design rockets.
> That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done.
That’s what anyone who’s self-centered and morally bankrupt enough would do perhaps, but no, not “anyone”. Some people are committed to being good (or at least striving towards it).
Your take strikes me as sociopathic at worst, and misguided at best. Much like musk, to your point.
There is a certain class of American that rides the knife edge between credulity and contempt in supporting and accepting the activities and intent of bad actors who pledge to get rid of the things they don't like and they people they detest. They're ever-ready to believe the barest of excuses and to hand-wave the worst excesses in this regard. Today's anti-woke are yesterday's McCarthyists, and history will note the echo.
The selfish kind. Unfortunately that seems to be the end goal of the American dream: "I got mine, fuck you." I can't tell you how many times I heard the "protect my family" argument from people I never thought would vote for that clown.
But people do come here specifically to be selfish. They like that they can be selfish here in ways that are socialized away in other countries. They like that they can even socialize their selfishness, forcing poor people to subsidize the rich.
They are typically uneducated victims of the largest and most well funded mass propaganda brainwashing campaigns in the history of mankind, to be fair. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. The perpetrators of the misinformation, however, know exactly what they’re doing.
I think this misrepresents the situation. Many of these people are well-educated and affluent. In fact, such efforts wouldn't be possible without the support of the wealthy and academic elite, including on the left. Stooge-of-the-month Ezra Klein is decried as a woke liberal by certain segments of the political sphere, and yet he's running interference against those who support forcing the affluent to give back some of their recent outsize gains (through his "abundance" tripe). It's not poor, rural red-staters listening to his message.
> Many of these people are well-educated and affluent.
That does not preclude them from being uneducated and gullible to brainwashing. In fact, there is a strong case to be made that being well-educated and affluent primes one to become more likely to be uneducated/brainwashed. When you are well-educated and affluent, the "yes men" show up and start to make you feel like you know everything, and it becomes really easy to lose the skepticism and awareness that one normally has.
> It's not poor, rural red-staters listening to his message.
Was there something to suggest that it was? I see no mention of this group anywhere.
A strong claim is severely weakened by lack of evidence. In this case, all evidence points to the claim being untrue.
> but ultimately the impact is good or bad doesn't matter at all.
That's essentially a rewording of the above claim and again without evidence.
In fact, it's detrimental for the perpetrators of disruptive actions to attract attention to them/selves when these actions don't achieve their purported benefits.
If they wanted only to simulate activity, they'd have used less damaging to themselves ways to achieve it without inflicting damage to the system. The latter is so important that it excludes accidental or PR-related actions to that end.
