#muskopolypse

What most people don’t seem to understand is that people with the kind of money that Musk have - they never lose.  The system is set up to make sure they don’t. Right now people are mocking him and decrying his leadership - later I expect think pieces about his ‘evolution’ and ‘genius’. Because things won’t end poorly for him. No matter what.

Why do I say that?

Well, look at his history and what he’s doing now. Musk’s main ability as an entrepreneur is to take something other people poured love and devotion into, hype it up, and then get out while the getting is good. He did that at paypal. And honestly - I think he’s getting ready to do that with Tesla. They’ve run into significant problems, bad press, and lawsuits. He’s not the kind that sticks it out.  From what I can tell, he loaded Twitter up with excess debt as part of the deal. It was already operating of a loss of over a billion a year. If you assume his only goal is to make money - what’s the quickest way to get Twitter out of a bad financial position. Oh, yeah. Bankruptcy. After bankruptcy, you have to be a profitable company. How do you do that? Cut costs and increase revenue. Now assume that you’re an amoral asshole who’s perfectly happy to get into bed with the Russians and Saudis to allow them a platform for political propaganda (you can use the Chinese to persuade the public that you’re ‘cracking down’ on this kind of thing without actually doing anything). From that perspective it makes sense. Cut costs to the bone, go into bankruptcy, rebuild the company with people who are happy to sell consumer data, promote hate speech, and interfere with elections. I mean, subscription money, if you can get it, is a more predictable income stream than advertising. And Twitter, despite it’s defects, has unparalleled network effects, far outsized of it’s actual user base. Inertia will keep many people on the platform for quite a while. And if you don’t care whose money you take - well, there’s a living in that - as long as you have no morals or care for your fellow human beings. 

I don’t think I’m supposed to find this as funny as I am. I had the day off and spent intermittent periods reading about Twitter and variously snickering, chortling, sniggering, and erupting in giggles as quietly as possible in a manner that one of my friends used to call ‘laughing into your beer’.  You know, when you’re trying not to laugh, so you hide your face and take a swallow, because your friend is an idiot and you know you aren’t supposed to laugh, but you can’t help it and end up spraying the table. Yeah. That.

Because other than locking himself out of the building because he was paranoid that employees would sabotage the company (why bother, when he’s doing such a bang up job himself?), he also managed to bluster his way into getting half of the employees he’d identified as ‘necessary’ to quit.

Most articles focus on the fact that he demanded that all the engineers agree to become ‘hardcore’. This demand is hilarious, to be sure. Simultaneously juvenile, since most people in software are adults with obligations to small children and elder care and can’t just live at twitter for weeks at a time. Plus, the obvious jokes about hardcore music or porn are just begging to be made, given Elon’s habit of sexually assaulting or harassing his employees.  But what really had me in stitches was that he he basically sent out a poll, saying “Either agree to work insane hours for no extra pay and no guarantees I won’t get rid of you in a week or take three months severance! Send back an emoji to tell me what you want to do.”

I mean. Who, getting that ultimatum from a deranged manbaby with entitled, and likely illegal expectations WOULDN’T opt for the other option? I honestly don’t know what he could have done to make make not working for him sound more appealing? Read the tweet in full Joker cosplay, complete with maniacal laughter? Announced that the company headquarters would only be lit by those Gwyneth Paltrow vagina candles? I don’t know. The mind boggles.  He’s clearly trying to force the company into bankruptcy. If he ever gets into trouble for stock manipulation or something else, he’ll have to cop to deliberately tanking the company. This is just blatant.  Like, there’s a couple reasons why software companies get bought: 1) capture or kill - the company is a competitor in the same market or is an obstacle to another goal of the person/org buying it. This is not obviously the motivation here, at least not from a business perspective, since his other businesses aren’t in the social media space and twitter doesn’t impact them otherwise. 2) assimilate - the company has functionality that you need. Usually, you’re buying either the existing code or the domain knowledge of the employees. If it’s the code, they usually let most of the employees go pretty quickly after a knowledge transition. If it’s the employees, they keep everyone and train them.

This LOOKS like situation one from the layoffs - except that Musk is gutting the business from the core functions of the platform on out. The kinds of things he’s been doing from a technical perspective are so dunderheaded it’s hard to wrap your head around whether he’s actually serious. “Let’s just turn off all those unnecessary microservices!”. “Code excellence is about quantity. Give me a bullet pointed list of what you’ve done!” Like, he can’t possibly be that dumb. 

Right? 

If you’re not in the software industry, this is a bit like saying “We don’t need stairs or elevators, they aren’t necessary for a building to function - just use the window from the 21rst floor.” or “Battlefield Earth was the best science fiction novel ever published...because it’s LOOOOOOOOOONG.”

I mean, if he wasn’t a billionaire, I have a feeling we’d be seeing reports of an intervention by friends and family right about now. Of course, he’s alienated pretty much all of his family, so no one is going to ask him how much nose candy he’s been snorting to be working non-stop. No one is going to wrest the keyboard away from him or help him get to know the nice men in white coats that should be coming to take him away..... (Yes, that’s a reference. And if you don’t know where it’s from, just let it hit you like a boot to the head. )

Anyway.

There are a couple things I can’t quite figure out about Musk or Twitter. I’m a person who likes patterns and finding the gaps in them... and there’s little things niggling at my brain that makes me wonder if we’re on the brink of a bot war. Let me explain.

Musk keeps saying “Twitter has more users than ever before”, which on the face of it doesn’t sound wrong. I mean, rubbernecking always draws a crowd, and since you don’t need an account to just read twitter - it’s easy enough to believe that all the headlines would draw people in to see what’s going on.  Except...I don’t really think it’s that likely. Folks who study these things have seen over a million twitter accounts closed in the past two weeks, and that’s quite likely to be real users. The thing that bothers me is that Musk keeps tweeting it out and I doubt he thinks it’s true either. For one thing, he’s publicly said he thinks Twitter has a high percentage of bots. Given his staff cuts, it’s likely that problem has gotten worse, instead of better. After all, there’s no reason for bots to leave - they’ll be infesting twitter as long as it lives. It’s also easy to see the usage numbers as an assist by Musk’s Russian backers. They likely are the ones who clued him in to the vast numbers of bots on the platform and are probably using bot networks to prop him up with good usage stats for advertisers. The irony being, of course, that high usage stats are great IF YOU HAVE ADVERTISERS - but otherwise just run up your bills. It’s like extending the hours at a restaurant where no one is eating - you still have to pay labor, electricity, and heating costs, but you have nothing coming in. So Musk must think that he’s performing a mind trick on marketeers (like mousketeers, but more obsessed with SEO) by convincing them that his platform is a good place to advertise through usage stats that he’s implying are real people, not bots. “These are not the bots you’re looking for” - Sith style (or Microsith, since we’re talking software).

And here’s where my brain is niggling at me and I wander into the land of the speculative. So at first I was wondering about the Ukrainians, whose PR strategy, especially around social media, has been so effective in helping them get international assistance (an existential issue for them). Learning that Musk, whose assistance with his starlink program has been variable, despite the priorities of the US military, is in bed with the Russians and taking over twitter has got to worry them. At first I wondered why they weren’t targeting Twitter - it’s a rich target that’s wide open right now. It wouldn’t be hard to take it’s availability stats down to the ground. But then they’d have to give up their own efforts. They could flood it with content that would drive away advertisers, but that might be to obvious a tactic and get backlash. Social media cyberwar is an indirect psyop and the people who are best at it tend to think orthogonally to the rest of us in very twisty ways. So I’m not sure I can guess what they’ll do. But right now, I think most people are waiting for the shot across the bow by the Russians. 

He may even succeed in turning every twitter user into a source of profit, but he will fundamentally change the character of the platform. The more worrying thing is that if he is successful- it’s easy to see him going on a buying spree of other social media platforms that aren’t profitable (like Tumblr) to either shut down the competition or transform them in similar ways. He could change the entire landscape of worldwide communications, which seems obviously attractive to a billionaire and his dubious backers (Russians and Saudis).

On the other hand - his privacy, security, and advertising execs quit today. And apparently Twitter was already under a consent decree by the FTC around security and privacy violations- and they issued a statement today, around the blue check mark feature.

He’s also been selling Tesla stock, causing that to lose value(after saying he wouldn’t ) to fund his current Twitter misadventures, pissing off his fanboy investors, who lost money and are trying to game out ways to recoup it.

So he’s got a fair number of people pissed at him - but most of those will come around if he can show a profit. I think he hasn’t begun to see the real problem he’s going to face.

See…Elon has always run dream factories- what I call companies that attract people who have a larger goal and few opportunities for people to combine their dreams with a decent standard of living. Believe in climate change and want to make electric cars a reality? Originally, Tesla was your only choice.

Want to work in space flight, but not for the government? SpaceX is one of the few ways you could do that.

Elon was able to be downright abusive to his employees and they put up with it, because it was a trade off for work they wouldn’t get any other way.

But Twitter? Twitter is a whole other bag of cats. Twitter is just software. Mature software. Not even very interesting software. In an industry which, despite recent layoffs, is teeming with opportunities to build something new, something interesting, and something that could make money. People in the industry have choices. They can go elsewhere- and they will.

You think that the old Twitter board hasn’t already identified key architects and engineers and tried to poach them?

Of course they have.