Musk warns twitter may have to declare bankruptcy

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, Beerzerker said:

Whether he bought, earned or whatever, he's got it and he's making money which is the mark of success, not failure.

There is a term called "fake it till you make it", and once you make it you should quit faking your way into things you are above your head in. Just sayin.

 

5 hours ago, Beerzerker said:

Certain "Jokes" come to mind with the above but I'll leave those where they are for the good of us all......
 

I picked that analogy because when you go into a hardware store to buy a hammer, you usually only see one or two types of hammers, and they all follow the same design. There are not designer hammers, there are not differently colored hammers, there are not different weighted hammers, or made of different materials. They're all generally steel, and exactly the same size. A human however, apparel companies, even ones run by men (eg Louis Vuitton for example) have to cater to tastes. Let's say Elon bought LVMH instead of Twitter, and did the same thing. Fired half the workforce, and then decided to have everything made in China, or built by robots. The company would die, overnight. That's because people buy LVMH because it's a high brand that is handmade, and people generally get off on wearing LVMH goods. Where as there is an entire secondary market made up of counterfeit LVMH goods that is a direct consequence of trying to sell Luxury goods that are out of reach. So if LVMH did what Elon did with Twitter, the company would literately die because it's not understanding the customers.

 

The entire Twitter Blue debacle and the veified checkmark is a completely misunderstanding of the users and potential customers. Advertisers fleeing the platform, is a complete misunderstanding of the people who pay Twitter.

 

 

5 hours ago, Beerzerker said:

Now - You are right in that he didn't do much himself except to say what he wanted, it was the ones he told what he wanted that were swarming around like flies on a stinking shitpile.

I believe Buffet with what he has and how he runs his business is proof enough of what does and doesn't work.
He's got his hands into all kinds of different business models that's unrelated, yet it works and it's all neatly under the Berkshire-Hathaway umbrella.

My example here is that if your business is working, you leave it to do what it does best.

 

Venture/Vulture Capitalists don't do that, they saddle the companies they buy with debt as a way to "unlock value" in the company (true fact, Apple had zero debt before 2013, and only did so at the behest of shareholders who wanted to "unlock value") and then sell off the assets and outsource everything, essentially only keeping the IP of the company. What works for AMD and Apple for making SoC's does not work for Hostess making Twinkies.

 

Like if it was prohibited entirely to "buy a company" outright, a lot of this crap would never happen. If you want to take a company private, you do so at your own personal risk that you stake your name on. You don't do it under a series of holding companies to transfer the parts you want to yourself and the parts you want to set on fire to another one to cut loose. When a company is public, it's accountable to it's shareholders, no matter how much of a dog-and-pony show it is really. When it's private, it could be failing terribly underneath and nobody would have enough information because of this entire culture of blaming others for failures and only taking credit for successes.

 

Is Elon smart? No, I think what we've all seen is a cult of personality that wants to believe he personally created SpaceX and Tesla because they are very future-forward technology. But the reality is that I think these companies want to keep him well away from actually touching the companies and if they could get rid of him, they would in a heartbeat. In some ways I think Elon just took "wacky out-of-touch techbro" helm off Steve Jobs when he died, because I never heard of Elon until after Jobs passed away. You know, around the same time Tesla went public.

 

This entire past decade feels like the decade of "Elon can do no wrong" in the media, when we just choose to ignore the wrongs, especially when Elon says profoundly stupid things.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is-doomed-elon-musk-says/

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-i-m-a-fucking-idiot-1838865882

https://www.businessinsider.com/fermi-paradox-drake-equation-aliens-elon-musk-2018-6

 

You can say stupid things, but when you do so while trying to appear competent to investors, well, that just makes them question how much of that was actually luck, or being in the right place at the right time. To me Elon shows no wisdom in his actions at Twitter.

 

 

[Lurick]

 

https://www.androidauthority.com/twitter-sms-2fa-3234698/

 

Well, I hope nobody here who uses twitter does so with SMS 2FA at least

[Shreyas1]

I think we all know who's really behind this 

 

Spoiler

 

[wanderingfool2]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

-snip-

You can try saying Elon fanboys, but the way you are going about it you are the opposite spectrum.  Both are equally bad.

 

You quote the lidar thing as if it's a stupid thing to say...yet there has been a push to move away from lidar/radar at many companies (there are clear issues trying to use lidar with self driving...including the fact that it's crazy expensive to get ones that are good enough).

 

Calling oneself an idiot though doesn't necessarily mean they are an idiot though.  There are plenty of interviews out there where he discusses actual technical details that you would very much would be unlikely to understand...you also don't need to be overly brilliant to recognize good talent and attract good talent.

 

People aren't willing to give up on Musk as CEO and such because they recognize what is brought to the table in the sense of a drive and attracting talent (serious, at least in 2019 Tesla and SpaceX were number one in terms of "attractive employer".

[NF-A12x25]

On 11/13/2022 at 4:22 PM, Arika S said:

Also sure hope people are happy musk was basically forced to buy Twitter now.

guy’s a moron, glad he’s losing money on this. If anyone deserves to lose billions on a shitty investment it’s him (i mean all billionaires do, they’re all pieces of shit, but him especially)

[NF-A12x25]

24 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

You can try saying Elon fanboys, but the way you are going about it you are the opposite spectrum.  Both are equally bad.

lol. lmao. reminds me of a certain meme about “centrists.”

[tkitch]

On 11/13/2022 at 2:21 PM, Kisai said:

1999 called. Usenet and IRC are unusable for communties due to the lack of moderation controls, where can be go to keep the spam at bay? 

 

/. (Slashdot) called and want's it's crown as "Reigning Champion of Breaking Websites" back.

[tkitch]

5 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

You can try saying Elon fanboys, but the way you are going about it you are the opposite spectrum.  Both are equally bad.

 

You quote the lidar thing as if it's a stupid thing to say...yet there has been a push to move away from lidar/radar at many companies (there are clear issues trying to use lidar with self driving...including the fact that it's crazy expensive to get ones that are good enough).

 

Calling oneself an idiot though doesn't necessarily mean they are an idiot though.  There are plenty of interviews out there where he discusses actual technical details that you would very much would be unlikely to understand...you also don't need to be overly brilliant to recognize good talent and attract good talent.

 

People aren't willing to give up on Musk as CEO and such because they recognize what is brought to the table in the sense of a drive and attracting talent (serious, at least in 2019 Tesla and SpaceX were number one in terms of "attractive employer".

Except:

He bought twitter for...  no clear reason?  (And obviously without a plan.)

 

And in the space of... 2 weeks, he's pushed the new acquisition to the edge of bankruptcy and has ALSO put a ~20% dent in the stock price of the company keeping him and his dumb practices afloat.

 

None of that is the mark of a "good businessman"

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, tkitch said:

 

/. (Slashdot) called and want's it's crown as "Reigning Champion of Breaking Websites" back.

Ah yes, I remember when being slashdot'ed or even mentioned by Wil Wheaton anywhere on the internet would crash your website for hours.

(And yes, both of those experiences were had.)

 

Back before "cloud" stuff was a thing and spinning up instances quickly was possible anyway.

 

Anyway, back to the topic. There hasn't been a day without some Elmo drama on twitter.

...

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...

...

 

...

Telegraphing pretty hard there Elon.

 

...

...

Subsequent to this, all hell broke loose.

 

...

...

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...

...

...

...

All of that in the span of a day.

 

At this point during basically everyone started auto-piloting to either leave the platform before twitter drives off a cliff, or doing things to call Elon's bluff.

 

I'm not even half way into the thread, and I think my points been made. In the scope of 4 days, Elon set fire to Twitanic and started charging people to line up to the lifeboats. No twitter blue? swim to shore.

  

 

 

[wanderingfool2]

1 hour ago, tkitch said:

Except:

He bought twitter for...  no clear reason?  (And obviously without a plan.)

 

And in the space of... 2 weeks, he's pushed the new acquisition to the edge of bankruptcy and has ALSO put a ~20% dent in the stock price of the company keeping him and his dumb practices afloat.

 

None of that is the mark of a "good businessman"

It's asinine to try claiming that.  Twitter was dumping money on the fire prior to him and honestly I don't think the Tesla is necessarily due to the recent drama.  It's following the drop based on the tech industry.

 

Just because a reason might not necessarily be clear to you, doesn't make it a bad business move.  You also can't take over a company and have a full plan if you don't know how bad it is internally. 

[SansVarnic]

On 11/13/2022 at 11:55 AM, oali24 said:

use it for their livelihood

Making better life choices is a thing that is very much lost on the current young generation.

[HenrySalayne]

16 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

You also can't take over a company and have a full plan if you don't know how bad it is internally. 

Which is a really sorry excuse after literally everybody told Elon over and over again that it will be almost impossible to turn Twitter in a viable business. Adding billions in debt also doesn't help very much. And erratically lighting a new dumpster fire every single day while blaming "activists" for his own shortcomings shines some light on the distorted perception of this man.

He could have and should have known how this will turn out. It was his decision to brush away all the warning signs.

[wanderingfool2]

7 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

Which is a really sorry excuse after literally everybody told Elon over and over again that it will be almost impossible to turn Twitter in a viable business. Adding billions in debt also doesn't help very much. And erratically lighting a new dumpster fire every single day while blaming "activists" for his own shortcomings shines some light on the distorted perception of this man.

He could have and should have known how this will turn out. It was his decision to brush away all the warning signs.

Well with Musk, you can't really count anything out really.  All this negativity and talk about how it will never be profitable and that he's running it into the ground...guess what we have heard exactly the same thing before about SpaceX and Tesla.

 

EV's can't be commercially produced, Tesla only makes a profit based on "regulatory credits", EV's will never be profitable.  Landing rockets will never work, look at how much SpaceX has crashed their rockets.  All these things were being said at one time or another...and yet they survived the hurdles.  Tesla was close to bankruptcy when Musk took over as CEO.  SpaceX was one failed rocket attempt away from having to call it quits.

 

The simple fact is, everyone here is being armchair CEO's and yet it's clear from how people are talking that they don't even understand the basics of why they have so much extra "debt"...or "close to bankruptcy".  Even the concept of declaring bankruptcy could be a plan to restructure the debts of Twitter.  Like I mentioned though, at it's peak Twitter actually netted over a billion in profits (not revenues but profits).  The also have a considerable amount of revenue, but tons of bloat.  If restructured correctly, Twitter likely could become a profitable company.

[Kisai]

53 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Well with Musk, you can't really count anything out really.  All this negativity and talk about how it will never be profitable and that he's running it into the ground...guess what we have heard exactly the same thing before about SpaceX and Tesla.

 

EV's can't be commercially produced, Tesla only makes a profit based on "regulatory credits", EV's will never be profitable. 

Nah, EV's weren't being commercially produced because there was no will to do so. Golf carts have been around for decades. So have Powerwheels. We know it works, the problem has always been energy density for a car to go more than 30 miles. Producing an EV back in 1997 was basically a suicide run, and GM wouldn't let people keep the cars.  The only way an commercially viable EV was going to happen was by building a car company from scratch with that purpose in mind, that also had to build the infrastructure to charge them. 

 

Japan was already doing that by the time Tesla came along. There was also Toyota producing the Prius which was "half way there". Realistically we probably should have started with battery-busses, but it is what it is. 

 

At present, anyone who buys a Tesla in BC has to drive to Vancouver to have it serviced. I know so, because one relative has one, and they were only able to do so because of the superchargers. Which need I remind (since we seem to be having similar "elon doesn't know how to run a business actually" arguments in multiple threads) the Superchargers are no longer free.

 

[maartendc]

On 11/13/2022 at 9:48 PM, Kisai said:

 

 

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/vulturecapitalist.asp

This is literately it.

 

Next prediction, Elmo will sell consolidate ...

and then sell off all the real estate assets.

 

 

 

Anyway. Download your data from Twitter now, because the last thing you want is for the company to go bankrupt and then that data ending up in the hands of a data broker or foreign entity.

 

Remember NCIX?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ncix-breach-probe-1.4833976

 

Now imagine that happening to twitter.

But how can you be a vulture capitalist if you OVERpaid for the company?

 

And AFAIK a software company like Twitter doesn't have a lot of real assets to sell off like other business might (factories, machines, land, materials, etc. etc.).

[Kisai]

46 minutes ago, maartendc said:

But how can you be a vulture capitalist if you OVERpaid for the company?

 

And AFAIK a software company like Twitter doesn't have a lot of real assets to sell off like other business might (factories, machines, land, materials, etc. etc.).

I never said vultures were smart or wise.  Many companies that used to work just fine, went bankrupt because the vultures sold off their property and then tried to make the company keep producing products using outsourcers. The Vulture only cares about the end result, and that can be destroying the company to sell it for parts.

 

I only figure there were three reasons:

1. Elon legitimately thought he could "fix twitter" and decided to pay market value for it (which is always a BAD thing)

2. Elon wanted to make it crash and burn at any cost

3. Elon legitimately doesn't understand how intangible companies work. He's never worked for or owned one since Zip2

 

The example that needs to be stated is that before cloud computing was a thing, companies actually owned hardware, if not data centers inside their HQ. If you were to do that today, you'd have a very hard time offloading company leased/owned computer equipment to switch to cloud instances this quickly.

 

I still feel that people are rightfully getting their schadenfreude out of their systems that's been pent up against billionaires not "giving back" on Musk, even though they don't benefit, and might even lose their social media network from it. If Bezos did it, people would probably give more of a care because Amazon.com has literately changed how businesses do online physical merchandise.

 

When Zuckerberg fails and flails, people also rightfully schadenfreude that as well. Same with all the failing crypto trash. "Look at this completely unwise investments catching fire", anyone who has seen VRChat or Second Life saw exactly what was going to happen to Meta. Nobody wants to "virtually work in the office", people want to virtually visit disneyland and avoid the lines and stinky sweaty crowds.

 

 

We can lose Twitter and something will replace it, but not for a fairly long while, and I think it was already replaced by Discord by anyone under the age of 30.

[Beerzerker]

13 hours ago, Kisai said:

I picked that analogy because when you go into a hardware store to buy a hammer, you usually only see one or two types of hammers, and they all follow the same design. There are not designer hammers, there are not differently colored hammers, there are not different weighted hammers, or made of different materials. They're all generally steel, and exactly the same size. A human however, apparel companies, even ones run by men (eg Louis Vuitton for example) have to cater to tastes. Let's say Elon bought LVMH instead of Twitter, and did the same thing. Fired half the workforce, and then decided to have everything made in China, or built by robots. The company would die, overnight. That's because people buy LVMH because it's a high brand that is handmade, and people generally get off on wearing LVMH goods. Where as there is an entire secondary market made up of counterfeit LVMH goods that is a direct consequence of trying to sell Luxury goods that are out of reach. So if LVMH did what Elon did with Twitter, the company would literately die because it's not understanding the customers.

Dead wrong about hammers.
Some are small, some are large depending on what they are to be used for. You can go into a hardware store and pick the size hammer you need for a given job - You don't use a standard nail driver for driving iron rods into the ground for example, that takes a larger, heavier hammer (Sledgehammer) to do. By the same token you don't use a sledgehammer to drive nails into a wall but in reality you could....
It's just that one is suitable for one kind of work like the other is for what it's made to do.
I have a few that's different sized, from a small 2oz hammer for really light work and gasket making, a standard one for regular work, one being a "Claw" hammer for standard nail/carpentry work and the other a "Plum" hammer for medium metal work up to a 2 pounder for driving heavier stuff like small rods, doing heavier metal work and so on. I even have a long handled "Driver" that has a claw with a standard hammerhead on it but the handle is much longer, it's for doing roofing work and that's why it has the longer handle.

Yes, there are many types of hammers you can get so there really are forms of "Designer" hammers out there since they are made for different, specific kinds of work - Even my big orange "Plastic" hammer is a specialty piece, being what's called a "Dead-Blow" hammer for working with metal and heavier pieces but at the same time it doesn't rebound when you use it.
The head is filled with sand/sand like material that when you hit something, it gets the full force of the blow and that's why it doesn't rebound or bounce off of what you hit with it.
So yes, they do come in different styles and colors too.

Now:
I'm not doubting you on Musk sending production of Tesla's over to China, that is fact and understand: I too don't care for that, knowing what the Chinese could and probrably are doing with the electronics while in the process making them.
All that does is to take jobs away from us here and we sorely need them.

13 hours ago, Kisai said:

The entire Twitter Blue debacle and the veified checkmark is a completely misunderstanding of the users and potential customers. Advertisers fleeing the platform, is a complete misunderstanding of the people who pay Twitter.

I can't really disagree with you, some really don't understand what it's for - Even I don't but that's because I have never used Twitter before nor have any plans to.

13 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

My example here is that if your business is working, you leave it to do what it does best.

 

Venture/Vulture Capitalists don't do that, they saddle the companies they buy with debt as a way to "unlock value" in the company (true fact, Apple had zero debt before 2013, and only did so at the behest of shareholders who wanted to "unlock value") and then sell off the assets and outsource everything, essentially only keeping the IP of the company. What works for AMD and Apple for making SoC's does not work for Hostess making Twinkies.

 

Like if it was prohibited entirely to "buy a company" outright, a lot of this crap would never happen. If you want to take a company private, you do so at your own personal risk that you stake your name on. You don't do it under a series of holding companies to transfer the parts you want to yourself and the parts you want to set on fire to another one to cut loose. When a company is public, it's accountable to it's shareholders, no matter how much of a dog-and-pony show it is really. When it's private, it could be failing terribly underneath and nobody would have enough information because of this entire culture of blaming others for failures and only taking credit for successes.

There are many ways to approach a buyout of a company, the example I experienced personally was just one and what I said is how it went.
Buffet's cronies did as they were told to do with us and that included largely dismantling the company as a whole, selling off what he didn't want to keep of it while keeping the rest for corporate use. 
Entire facilities were shutdown and these assets were sold off, even what used to be it's corporate headquarters was dismantled and sold off and it hurt the community it was based within causing an economic turndown for awhile. What did eventually happen was a few companies did buy the buildings and so on, opened up branches of their own businesses in them but the number of folks hired to fill these new jobs wasn't near what had been there before.
The same went for the employeees, some forced into early retirement or just fired/layed off.

The company I worked for was indeed working, it was all done to eliminate the corporate name since it had been a competitor before the buyout. By eliminating the name and then placing it all directly under the "Other" competitor's name, that effectively killed it off for good as planned while retaining the value of the assets, product lines we had and whatever else they wanted to keep.
 

13 hours ago, Kisai said:

Is Elon smart? No, I think what we've all seen is a cult of personality that wants to believe he personally created SpaceX and Tesla because they are very future-forward technology. But the reality is that I think these companies want to keep him well away from actually touching the companies and if they could get rid of him, they would in a heartbeat. In some ways I think Elon just took "wacky out-of-touch techbro" helm off Steve Jobs when he died, because I never heard of Elon until after Jobs passed away. You know, around the same time Tesla went public.

Same could be said about Gates - He did the ground work for having something to start of with, all the rest that was done afterwards was done by others.
I'm not saying Musk literally created the tech but he did finance it and hire the "Right" people to make it happen, so he owns it and the owner of something is who gets credit for it.
May not be fair but that's how it goes and by financing it all, he took the risk of it failing too and losing his proverbial ass over it so some credit is due for that in itself. The others under him would have been out of a job - True, but woudn't have been held directly responsible for the monetary debt from the bankruptcy part of it as he surely would have been.

His name on the dotted line? (And it was)....
That means his ass was on it too.

13 hours ago, Kisai said:

This entire past decade feels like the decade of "Elon can do no wrong" in the media, when we just choose to ignore the wrongs, especially when Elon says profoundly stupid things.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is-doomed-elon-musk-says/

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-i-m-a-fucking-idiot-1838865882

https://www.businessinsider.com/fermi-paradox-drake-equation-aliens-elon-musk-2018-6

 

You can say stupid things, but when you do so while trying to appear competent to investors, well, that just makes them question how much of that was actually luck, or being in the right place at the right time. To me Elon shows no wisdom in his actions at Twitter.

 

 

Goes back to what I said about a certain truth - No one is perfect and I already know not to hold him up on a pedestal for myself get bonked on the head when he falls off.
He's made mistakes like anyone else has before and I'm not going to create or make excuses about it - He's done what he's done but at the same time, he's done what he's done too and I'll leave it at that.

There is just so much HATE being directed towards him for hate's sakes it seems......
He was once a hero, then was hated for proposing to buy Twitter for the reasons he stated, then said he was backing out of the deal. More hate followed, then changed his mind again and went through with it - MORE hate followed yet again.

It's like some are just determined to hate no matter what he does as the previously referred to "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of thing.
If I were he, I'd say "To hell with it" and then do what I'm going to do anyway since there is obviously no pleasing some of you.
That's why I can't take any of this seriously - There is no sensible rational for such hatred.
Or as it's said: "Hater's gonna hate".

[mr moose]

23 hours ago, Kisai said:

There was nothing wrong with fact-checking,

 

 

 

like fuck there was nothing wrong with it.  If they were honest they would have called it "this doesn't fit with our ideology so we are going to find a creative way to call it a lie and put big warnings all over it".

 

 

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

The simple fact is, everyone here is being armchair CEO's and yet it's clear from how people are talking that they don't even understand the basics

 

All I need to know is that while musk is CEO of several incredibly large companies and continues to go from strength to strength, then he knows shit I don't.  We can all pretend he isn't smart, but at the end of the day was it someone on this forum who had the ability to buy a company they didn't need for $44B?

[Beerzerker]

28 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

like fuck there was nothing wrong with it.  If they were honest they would have called it "this doesn't fit with our ideology so we are going to find a creative way to call it a lie and put big warnings all over it".

 

 

I guess FB is honest then - This is right out of their own playbook.

[Sauron]

14 minutes ago, Beerzerker said:

Same could be said about Gates - He did the ground work for having something to start of with, all the rest that was done afterwards was done by others.

Yes, and also Gates got his start because his mother was a prominent executive and had connections with IBM execs who under her suggestion contracted Microsoft.

18 minutes ago, Beerzerker said:

I'm not saying Musk literally created the tech but he did finance it and hire the "Right" people to make it happen, so he owns it and the owner of something is who gets credit for it.

No he didn't, CEOs/owners aren't really part of any hiring process unless it's a small business with like 10 employees and the consequences of them directly meddling with human resources is what we're seeing happen to twitter.

20 minutes ago, Beerzerker said:

May not be fair but that's how it goes and by financing it all, he took the risk of it failing too and losing his proverbial ass over it

Losing what? If he wanted to he could just liquidate his assets and walk away richer than he will ever need to be. If twitter dies he'll lose billions but he can just file for bankruptcy and walk away, still being extremely wealthy. For comparison, Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy multiple times, he's still a billionaire and in fact his bankruptcies arguably made him wealthier. There is no risk to him other than functionally meaningless fluctuations in his stock portfolio.

 

Well, there is a small risk of him being prosecuted by the FCC if he keeps breaking the law but that's not really inherent to investing, is it?

17 minutes ago, mr moose said:

All I need to know is that while musk is CEO of several incredibly large companies and continues to go from strength to strength, then he knows shit I don't.  We can all pretend he isn't smart, but at the end of the day was it someone on this forum who had the ability to buy a company they didn't need for $44B?

I wonder then, at what point do you feel it's fair to critique these people? If they make money you assume they did something to deserve it; if they lose money you assume there must be some grand design behind it because they had money to lose in the first place.

 

The simplest explanation to these events is that they are just normal people who have ups and downs but wield extremely disproportionate wealth and power, meaning they have several advantages leading them to succeed and little consequences if they fail. I don't know if I personally would be a better CEO (although in this specific case it seems like doing absolutely nothing would have been much better for the company) but I know I don't want anyone to individually have this much influence and power when clearly they're just winging it like the rest of us.

[mr moose]

3 minutes ago, Sauron said:

I wonder then, at what point do you feel it's fair to critique these people? If they make money you assume they did something to deserve it; if they lose money you assume there must be some grand design behind it because they had money to lose in the first place.

I don't understand how this applies to what I said.   Musk has repeatedly shown his ability to manage and grow very large companies, his track record even with failures do not set him back.  So it only stands to reason that if stupidity can get you that far how dumb are the rest of us for barely cracking 6 figures?

 

3 minutes ago, Sauron said:

The simplest explanation to these events is that they are just normal people who have ups and downs but wield extremely disproportionate wealth and power, meaning they have several advantages leading them to succeed and little consequences if they fail. I don't know if I personally would be a better CEO (although in this specific case it seems like doing absolutely nothing would have been much better for the company) but I know I don't want anyone to individually have this much influence and power when clearly they're just winging it like the rest of us.

 

Jordan Peterson has a great talk on the type of person that becomes CEO and their personality traits.  Nearly all of them are high IQ and highly driven workaholics. Traits that are measurably a long way from the average person.

 

Do you have any evidence he is "winging it" or that doing nothing would have been much better?  It is really easy to see only the superficial and forget to consider all the things we don't know.  Which is why I look at his career and position over all and decided that I don't know enough to question his intelligence, suffice to say if stupidity can get you this much success repeatedly then I would hate think how stupid the average working human is.

 

 

[Moonzy]

8 minutes ago, mr moose said:

then I would hate think how stupid the average working human is.

emm... voluntarily selling their life and time to make someone else richer, you be the judge of that

[Sauron]

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I don't understand how this applies to what I said.   Musk has repeatedly shown his ability to manage and grow very large companies, his track record even with failures do not set him back.  So it only stands to reason that if stupidity can get you that far how dumb are the rest of us for barely cracking 6 figures?

I'm suggesting there is no correlation.

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Jordan Peterson has a great talk on the type of person that becomes CEO and their personality traits.  Nearly all of them are high IQ and highly driven workaholics. Traits that are measurably a long way from the average person.

As with most things he says he's wrong here as well. By "nearly all of them" I assume he meant the handful he picked to support his idea and even then our ability to assess if someone is a "workaholic" is highly subjective and conveniently not measurable. It's also easier to work long hours if you don't have to worry about shopping for groceries, cooking, picking up your kids etc. because you're obscenely wealthy. Even if it were true, plenty of people work very hard and have pretty high IQ scores but will never be CEO. Consider that even in a society where everyone has an IQ of 200 and works 16h a day, only a handful can be CEO by definition. You can't run a company where everyone is CEO.

 

I wonder what he'd answer if someone pointed out that being a wealthy CEO seems to heavily coincide with coming from at least an affluent family and being part of hegemonic majority groups.

10 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Do you have any evidence he is "winging it" or that doing nothing would have been much better?

Impulse buying a company, illegally firing half the staff and then calling them back because it turns out they were pretty important seems like winging it to me, and it also seems to me like not doing those things would have been beneficial. If by "evidence" you mean "perfect vision into an alternate timeline where this didn't happen" then I'm afraid by your standards it's impossible to ever allege incompetence against anyone.

12 minutes ago, mr moose said:

It is really easy to see only the superficial and forget to consider all the things we don't know.  Which is why I look at his career and position over all and decided that I don't know enough to question his intelligence, suffice to say if stupidity can get you this much success repeatedly then I would hate think how stupid the average working human is.

To be clear, if/when I call Elon Musk an idiot it's not just because of this. He has a track record of saying and doing absolutely idiotic things. It's possible in some occasions he did stupid things intentionally to get attention and popularity, which in some cases directly resulted in him getting wealthier, but here it's just him losing money and destroying a company for no discernible reason other than ego; at some point if it acts exactly like a duck it might as well be a duck.

[ravenshrike]

38 minutes ago, Sauron said:

By "nearly all of them" I assume he meant the handful he picked to support his idea and even then our ability to assess if someone is a "workaholic" is highly subjective and conveniently not measurable.

If you consistently work over 60 hours a week(not at work, actually doing work, it's easy enough to fuck off while supposedly working), you're not at some sort of job where it's several weeks on, several weeks off, and it's not because you're at the very bottom of the economic ladder, you're a workaholic. While mildly subjective in that it would require someone to self report the amount of actual working vs being where their job is performed, it's rather objective. Examples include the aforementioned CEOs, chefs, most entrepreneurs that don't throw in the towel after less than a year, and interestingly enough quite a few livestreamers.