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Lock the exits! It’s time for a game of Calvinball!

New rules on Twitter.

Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.

You know, if Twitter really were the superior choice for social media, you wouldn’t need to block mentions of the competition. That’s something Musk himself argued a few decades…I mean, a few years…I mean a few months ago.

The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!

Twitter. It’s the bad one.

This is the way Musk has always operated…only his usual scheme doesn’t work with this kind of company.

Here’s the Musk playbook: Enter a field with very little competition. Claim that your new company will solve a massive, global problem or achieve a seemingly impossible goal. Raise money from a fervent group of true believers and keep them on the hook with flashy, half-baked product ideas. Suck up billions from the government. Underpay, undervalue, and overwork your employees. Repeat.

Elon Musk. He’s the bad one.

One week until Christmas! » « Australians have all the luck

Comments

  1. petesh says

    I had a low opinion of Musk last year, based largely on his claims of individual success that was obviously financed by government money. I approved of spending government money to advance electric car production (not for Space or tunneling) but he never seemed to acknowledge that his fortunes came from partnerships. (The first important one being PayPal, who kicked him out.) Now we are getting to see in full what an egocentric idiot he is, and I sincerely hope that the Tesla board will also kick him out, as I believe they can and should, in their own interests; also that the banks who bought into Twitter find a way of removing him at least from executive decision-making. Just tell him he is colonizing Mars and shoot him into space, that should do it. Really, I’d rather see him bankrupt but a one-way ticket off-planet would suffice.

  2. JM says

    From the looks of what is happening on Twitter the quick turn around time of an internet business is actually a problem for Twitter. Musk has an idea, demands it be implemented and they can roll the simpler ones almost instantly. This means little time for Musk to realize something is a bad idea or for somebody to talk him out of it.
    Changing a car is a lot of work. Even small changes mean changes to the design specs, recalculating costs and prices and changes to the supply lines. If it requires retraining the factory workers or rebuilding part of the factory even more time. If it requires redoing safety testing add a couple of months. This means a lot of time for Musk to lose interest in his latest idea and move on to something else.

  3. raven says

    Here is more from the article in Insider about why Elon Musk will fail at Twitter.

    “There is no pivot in which Musk suddenly becomes serious and starts acting like a normal executive. The frenzied, callous, throwing-ideas-at-the-wall boss from hell you see on Twitter is the one people actually get in Musk world. It’s always been that way. Somehow, during a bull market, in a decade when tech was on top of the world and he was the king of it — that style worked. Now it won’t.”

    Musk has also received many billions of dollars of government subsidies and government tax breaks, probably at least over $10 billion. He isn’t going to get those at Twitter.

    Quite a few of his companies have gone nowhere. That would be the Boring company, the home robot company, Neuralink, and maybe Solar City.
    Tesla bought Solar City in 2016 from his cousins, and it is part of Tesla. It doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere but downhill either.

    At Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk was a jerk with a grand vision. At Twitter, he’s just a jerk.

    Elon’s stale playbook
    At Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk was a jerk with a grand vision. At Twitter, he’s just a jerk.

    Elon musk juggling a Tesla car and rocket, with Twitter logos falling behind 2×1
    Without a big, world-changing vision to distract from his sophomoric product ideas and erratic management, Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover is doomed. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images;
    Linette Lopez Insider
    Dec 18, 2022, 3:37 AM Edited for length

    Elon Musk has a pretty tried-and-true playbook for doing business — he’s used it for years to build companies from Tesla to SpaceX. Unfortunately for him, it is not a model that can turn Twitter into a profitable company. It’s one that will take the social-media company down in flames.

    Here’s the Musk playbook: Enter a field with very little competition. Claim that your new company will solve a massive, global problem or achieve a seemingly impossible goal. Raise money from a fervent group of true believers and keep them on the hook with flashy, half-baked product ideas. Suck up billions from the government. Underpay, undervalue, and overwork your employees. Repeat.

    Twitter is the antithesis of an “Elon Musk company.

    At previous stops in his career, Musk’s employee-punishing, product-pushing plays worked. The social-media company has key differences from his other holdings that turn Musk’s own strategies against him.

    O come all ye faithful
    At the core of every Musk company is a big, world-changing promise — they sell the idea that their products and services are saving humanity from some intractable problem, whether it’s climate crisis or traffic. But Musk’s promises track more with religion — he has been sent to save us from our earthly sins of waste and pollution — than with science.

    For Musk, having a mission is key, because having a mission attracts money. It allows him to rope in governments, which are more than willing to outsource their intractable problems. Despite his complaints about government subsidies, Musk’s companies are dependent on them. A Los Angeles Times review in 2015 revealed that he had taken over $4 billion in government funding at that point. And since then, Tesla has received billions in government-created regulatory credits from combustion-engine-car companies, over $1 billion in tax breaks and grants to build out more factories in Nevada and New York, billions in contracts for SpaceX, and even payroll benefits from the pandemic stimulus bill. Even his more far-flung ideas have soaked up government cash. According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, The Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-based solution to urban traffic, has been trying to collect government subsidies all over the country (and in Canada) despite only building a single tunnel in Las Vegas.

    No time to waste
    A Musk company is usually the first, and sometimes the only, company in a specific market. Tesla, for most of its existence, has been the sexiest option for high-end electric cars. SpaceX has little competition when it comes to delivering payloads to space. Doing business in a field without competitors (and with generous investors) creates room to test new technologies, and sometimes fail at them. Musk tried to make an auto factory without human workers, and ended up having to trash billions of dollars worth of useless robots when it didn’t work (just like industry experts told him it wouldn’t). To make up for the lost time and space, Tesla ended up having to set up a very human-run manufacturing line in a tent outside its California factory.

    There won’t be as much time for these monkeyshines at Twitter. I probably don’t need to tell you that it is not at the top of the social-media pecking order.

    The house of Musk has never weathered an economic downturn.
    To deal with these headwinds, any competent CEO needs to have a plan. Based on his most recent quarterly calls with investors — the ones where he is supposed to talk about plans to make more money — Musk does not have one.

    There is no pivot in which Musk suddenly becomes serious and starts acting like a normal executive. The frenzied, callous, throwing-ideas-at-the-wall boss from hell you see on Twitter is the one people actually get in Musk world. It’s always been that way. Somehow, during a bull market, in a decade when tech was on top of the world and he was the king of it — that style worked. Now it won’t.

  4. raven says

    Musk

    Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.

    He is missing some of the major social media sites.

    There is no mention of TikTok, YouTube, and Telegram.
    This might be because many people embed videos in their Tweets from these sites.

    (There is no mention of Freethoughtblogs either.)

  6. says

    Burn baby, burn. I’m sorry for all the people that are loosing their job, but I can’t stop laughing. The funniest bit is watching all the fans defending anything he does. I’m laughing so hard I’m half tempted to eat a gun…

  8. Louis says

    None of those right wing/far right sites are mentioned are they? Parler? Trump’s one (Is that Truth?)? Etc

    Louis

  9. iiandyiiii says

    We may be weeks away from the effective destruction of Twitter. I went ahead and created a Mastodon account — I started on Octodon, like PZ, but it turns out Octodon blocks a bunch of the people I follow (mostly those on journa.host, which includes a whole heap of quality journalists), so I switched to Universedon.

  10. says

    You ever play Monopoly with someone who changes the rules at their convenience? It really sucks. That’s Elon Musk and he really sucks.

  11. says

    @10 Actually, now that I think about it, that’s a lot of people on the right. There’s that congressman who wants to RAISE the voting age back to 21. There’s that preacher in Texas that wants to make Senatorial elections based on a new “State Electoral College”. They really like that Electoral College. Obsolete and old, just like the rest of the GOP.

  12. says

    How the whole thing with the submarine to rescue the boys trapped in that cave and Musk’s accusations towards that guy who said it was a bad idea didn’t turn everyone off him immediately will never cease to amaze me.

  13. John Morales says

    Heh. Tabby, you highlight the issue: Twitter is Twitter, and Musk is Musk.

    But, for the time being, they’re seen as being the same, in O so many posts.

    —

    Ray @10, so don’t play. Simple.

  14. StevoR says

    @ 5. Louis : “None of those right wing/far right sites are mentioned are they? Parler? Trump’s one (Is that Truth?)? Etc”

    Actually, Trump’s laughably named “Truth” IS on the list above :

    Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.

    Though intrestingly, the nazi social media of choice – from what I gather – Parler and the Chinese govt linked Tik Tok are not..

    Incidentally, Facebook is fine with quoting links to twitter and discussion of it FWIW and was even when it was in competent hands rather than Musks’ incompetent, self-destructive ones.

  15. microraptor says

    So apparently Musk’s currently running a poll on whether or not he should resign as head of twitter. And “Yes” (he should resign) is way up. Really questionable whether or not he’s actually follow through with it or just declare that it was ruined by bots.

  17. John Morales says

    Um, doesn’t one have to create a Twitter account to vote, Nemo?

    Far as I’m concerned, he bought it, he can run it howsoever he likes.

    (I mean, no skin off my nose)

  18. microraptor says

    @17: It’s obvious that he’ll run it however he feels like regardless of the poll results. All it’s going to do is annoy Muskrat, which is worthwhile in and of itself.

  19. John Morales says

    microraptor:

    All it’s going to do is annoy Muskrat, which is worthwhile in and of itself.

    Well, should I bother to create a Twitter account just to vote on this poll, then Twitter has one more user. How is that supposed to annoy him?

    (Isn’t growing the userbase a net benefit to him?)

  21. mordred says

    As to the latest poll about the Twit resigning: Could it be he’s fed up with his latest toy but his ego does not allow him to admit he failed? So he just follows the users vote and all the fallout from his short time as Twithead is their fault from now on…

  22. unclefrogy says

    well if he did decide to just follow the users as expressed by polls that would an interesting development and very different from how he has managed things up to now. That might even be a better way but I do not see how he could see himself the big man unless he was making all the decisions. He is the most important person involved after all at least he has to try and convince everyone he is and not at all the beneficiary of luck and history . He has no sense of proportion

  23. rietpluim says

    I just can’t imagine how people like Musk or Trump attract so many followers. I really can’t.

  25. unclefrogy says

    some people want it to be true they want the guy with the absolute definite answers the guy that is in control because they feel so overwhelmed afraid and alone, similar reason for much of religious faith and behavior. It is a pity really but existence just ain’t like that.
    The world of man and his doings like the world inhabited by these men and their followers really remind me this speech

    Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
    Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
    And then is heard no more. It is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.

    the last 2 lines particularly.
    might be the turn of the year that has me in this kind of mood but there does seem to be an awful lot of idiots and fools about lately causing a lot of trouble for no particularly good reasons

  26. Louis says

    @StevoR #14,

    Cheers. I wasn’t sure about Truth. I abso-fucking-lutely was not googling for fear of turning my computer fash.

    ;-)

    Louis

  27. mordred says

    And the people have spoken: Musk should resign!

    Only a ridiculously small fraction of users participated in the poll as usual. Now lets see what the former Head Twit does now…

  28. lotharloo says

    If I had twitter, I would have voted for Elon Musk to stay as the CEO. It’s much more funnier that way. LUL.

  29. whywhywhy says

    What I have learned from watching Elon f up: If someone strongly advocates as a free speech absolutist, they will shutdown critical speech of themselves at the first opportunity.