4705

Why were you never with me in my painful meetings with CEOs and marketing heads back in the day? I could have used a second.

Them: “Look, let’s just rewrite our core enterprise system.”
Me: “No, let’s just chain and lock all the doors from the inside, then set the building on fire. It would be a lot faster and less painful, and it would cost less.”

4706

I love that he can’t actually explain the problem.

I guess I never thought Twitters problem was it’s tech stack.

4707

Yeah. Every time I find myself about to say “it’s complicated, I can’t really explain it,” I stop and tell myself “That means I don’t understand it either. Better do some more thinking/research before I open my mouth.” Mind you, it took decades of screwing up to come to that conclusion, but still.

4708

Here is the full audio/video of the spaces session. The exerpts are chopped together to give the worst impression of Elon possible - the unedited version is not quite as bad, but the fundamental combination of ignorance and arogance is still there. He’s criticising shit he’s barely got the 10,000ft view on and the host is a ‘friendly’ (employee?) and generally busy brown-nosing, nodding along and suggesting he could fix shit in a jiffy.

My takeaway is that Elon is well up his own ass and does indeed fervently believe hs is the smartest guy in every room.

4709

New employee who resigned / got fired the same day of the recording.

4710

Haha, he pretty much presented himself as already being across Twitter’s architecture and tooling and could fix various things, you know like just changing how some algo’s worked, or using one algo for a different purpose - like using the timeline algo to drive advertising placements, like it would be some trivial change. He was mostly extremely differential to Musk during that spaces call.

4711

12-week stint? Is Elon expecting to do this with temps?

4712

Socrates would like a word.

4713

In my experience the very best employees are the ones who come in and right away start talking about how they have a whole lot of solutions/answers for an architecture they are just starting to learn.

4714

That reminds me of every consulting firm that ever visited us at the company I used to work for, every year or two Bain would show up, charge millions of dollars, and cluelessly make a host of recommendations on how to fix things.

They knew exactly nothing about anything.

And in the end made the same recommendation they always made, fire some people.

The only consulting that proved even more clueless was what came out of the MBA interns we got every summer. But those somehow I found charmingly hilarious, probably because they were free.

4715

Even in academia the word “consultant” invites derision, scorn, and contempt, unless of course it’s you doing the consulting grift, in which case it’s all good.

4716

How painful is that to listen to?

4717

Tesla stock dropped another 8.9% today. The rest of the market had a pretty bad day, but not that bad — (S&P down 1.45% and NASDAQ down 2.18%). Overall Tesla is down 36% just in December.

4718

For context, the Dow is down 3.4% on the month in total. So Tesla is meaningfully underperforming the market as a whole

4719

That is one hell of a 52 week range.

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4720

One might be forgiven for thinking that some Tesla stock holders are not pleased with Elon’s antics.

4721

Yeah, I mean you’d think shareholder lawsuits would have already happened.

4722

Looks like Bill Gates was right! I wonder if shorting Tesla came up in one of his 37 meetings with Jeffery Epstein.

4723

For the most recent stuff? I think everyone is waiting for the new year.

Of course, there’s already a lawsuit (filed in 2018 and went to trial last month) by Tesla shareholders over Musk’s $50 billion 2018 compensation package.

4724

And I agree. In a world of excessive executive compensation, Elmo’s $50B was over the top.