Technology

I worked for a guy, many years ago, small scale version of Musk. Guys like that hate to be contradicted. He had gone into partnership with my old company - which was a digital election company (back in the 90s and early 00s). We prided ourselves on our security and anonymity measures. Under this new company, this guy because CEO, and the first thing he did was tell everyone we could make “millions” by selling user data. I pointed out that violated out privacy and anonymity standards, and not even the next day I was reprimanded for speaking out.

You don’t need to be a billionaire to be stupid. Affluent is enough of a threshold. These are all grifters, granted many being successful. The grifters in this company were big fish/little pond. But they ruined a lovely little company that could have been stable and steady, recession-proof income for decades. Instead, they grifted the angel investors, ran the company into the ground and ended up spawning dozens of competitors in the field whereas before there were only 2 or 3.

These guys go from start-up grift to start-up grift, maintaining their affluence on the investor’s dime. I would say they, and the vulture capitalists they dance with deserve each other, but unfortunately, regular folks are always the collateral damage.

Musk was likely always an idiot, but was propped up by money, and earlier on either knew his place (as the “faceman”) or was adroitly distracted from direct involvement with the actual running of the company he bought.

The most convincing argument that elon does a lot of cocaine is just listening to him speak in a less formal interview.

BUT! I don't think he used to be actually smart, just lucky. Too many people assume "succesful" people had to have done something exceptional to earn it, but 99% of extremely wealthy people acquired that extreme wealth through a simple combination of luck and startup capital (which of course they have because they are lucky).

He purchased his companies from other people who had already developed the ideas. The only patent with Musks name on it for Tesla is the charging port that is proprietary so other electric vehicles couldn't use tesla charging stations.

He does indeed have a history of paying his way into looking like a visionary and/or an engineer. He bought into Tesla in early 2004, it was founded in mid 2003.

His comfort zone was convincing people to give him money for one really ambitious thing, and then using that money to achieve some other thing (that no one would have given him money for) that is sort of on the way, but which has commercial value to him.

For example, he has repeatedly said his companies will deliver full self-driving cars by dates that have passed - and convinced investors to get him in a position to compete with companies like Toyota, promised a 'hyperloop' and got funding to compete with other horizontal drilling companies, promised to send people to mars and got to compete with other satellite technology companies.

So making big promises paid off for him. For the investors, in terms of long term value, they might have been better off investing in existing companies he ended up competing with.

But I suspect he is now outside his comfort zone, and might not even realise how far out of his depth he is.

Also read that Microsoft is holding the trademark on 'X' because of DirectX, X-Box, etc...

I wonder how long until Elon pulls the "it's just a joke bro"

It's even worse than that. X is used so widely in trademarks that it's guaranteed to attract lawsuits. Facebook had to settle several claims over the change to Meta, and the use of X is a much bigger problem than that. And Musk is so dumb that he'll probably try to fight them and end up paying a fortune in legal fees anyway.

Edit: Relevant article: https://www.reuters.com/technology/problem-with-x-meta-microsoft-hundreds-more-own-trademarks-new-twitter-name-2023-07-25/

I have read here on Lemmy someone claim this is all political and just 4D chess to own the libs.

He is the only share owner. He bought the whole company.

He’s the largest shareholder and it’s a private company, which is why we depend on companies holding his debt for guesstimates about the valuation. There’s no market forces that are punishing him for bad decisions, other than him not being able to service his/twitter’s debt based on twitter’s dwindling income.

Jack Dorsey and his Saudi partners agreed to hold onto their shares (ie, not force Musk to buy them) and together they held about $3.5B out of the $44B valuation when it went private. Dorsey just started offering some super gentle criticism while saying it’s a very hard job.

I don’t know if they’re under NDAs, or if they’re afraid of crashing their investments further by criticizing him in public, or if they just don’t care because what’s a few billion between friends. Maybe they’re sending him angry texts.

I’m just hoping that someone comes out with a tell-all that ends up being a movie called The Anti-Social Network.

TWTR had about 765M shares outstanding. I didn’t follow them throughout the entire run up to the Muskening, but it looked like they were averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of $35/share, meaning their valuation would be about $25-30B. I’m deliberately ignoring the fact that they went into the 60s and 70s for an extended period in 2021 because I’m not sure what was driving that apart from cheap money and higher online activity during covid.

I still think he overpaid by a factor of about 1.5.

Musk did not pay $44 billion to buy Twitter. He paid $26 billion, underwritten by stock in Tesla, which subsequently lost significant value. $5 billion was from other investors including the Saudi Prince.

The remaining $13 billion was a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk's behalf. Even before Musk started tanking the revenue, Twitter could not afford that debt - the interest alone was comparible to its revenue. That debt is probably about what Twitter is worth right now after the name change, making it pretty much unviable as a business.

You don't have to look at Musk's antics to conclude that the intention was to kill the company. You only have to look at the financials.

Leveraged buyouts almost always lead to the business closing. It's how Toys R Us, and many other staple brands, were brought down.

wait he actually built that?