I was just about to post the same thing. I'm sure this is some kind of eleven-dimensional chess from a big-brain business genius, right?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/29/23981928/elon-musk-ad-boycott-go-fuck-yourself-destroy-x
“I hope they stop. Don’t advertise,” Musk told interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. “If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.” He singled out Disney CEO Bob Iger, who discussed not wanting Disney to be affiliated with Musk while on stage earlier in the day. “Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience.”
At this point, I half-believe Musk has given up any hope of turning Twitter around, and he's just entertaining himself by seeing how much crazy shit he can pull before the company burns to the ground.
I don't know about that.
I've been wanting to understand Musk, so I've been reading quite a bit about his other businesses and found a lot of insight in The Founders, which is a detailed account of the original X.com and PayPal and exactly the steps involved.
I've learned A LOT about Musk's decision making process, and more importantly, how his personality became solidified by the exceptional events of his 20s. I firmly believe he would be a very different person had his major successes occured later in life, but he received ENORMOUS positive reinforcement for his early 20s hubris and understanding that has really helped me grasp all of his behaviours better.
His entire success has been founded on him interpreting all criticism as evidence of his own superior intelligence. He sees all business conventions and rules as opportunities for more efficiency. This means that the more his behaviour at Twitter looks like failure on the outside, the more he will believe he's on the right track and getting closer to world-changing breakthroughs.
However, this is a VERY different situation than he's used to, and I'm not convinced the methods he sees as "superior" can work in this context because key ingredients are missing.
It's quite easy to look at banking, cars, and space industries and see obvious inefficiencies and a cumbersome resistance to innovation. He identified these 3 industries as targets in his early 20s, it's not like he had success with PayPal and then along the way discovered other opportunities, no, these were targets from essentially Day 1 of his entrepreneurial career.
The thing is, other than having the very valid idea that these industries were bloated and slow and that they could be competed with, he didn't really have a lot of ideas. His original X.com idea never worked, neither X.com nor Confinity even came up with e-payments as a business model, they both kind of stumbled ass-backwards into them, ended up in competition, and then ended up merged.
That's not uncommon, that's how a lot of businesses succeed, without any clear notion of an idea to begin with.
But Musk's various businesses had a very clear mission: innovate an existing dinosaur industry. That's the kind of radical thing that attracts genius talent, especially with a cult of personality around Musk.
That's the 4D chess, Musk would use his spectacular hubris to identify obvious inefficiencies in bloated, old industries, and have unwavering arrogant faith in how own superiority to do a better job, and then a dedicated team of nerds would follow him and generate the actual ideas to innovate under his relentless pressure to break rules and conventions.
That's good 4D chess. He actually needs the spectacular ego to drive his will to improve systems. He has to see all existing rules as stupid and breakable. He has to see all criticism as evidence that others are stupid. As long as he has an army of dedicated nerds that he can push to the very limits of their capacity to generate fucking brilliant solutions, his "flaws" are what drive his success.
Here's the problem though, what major issue did Twitter have?
His targeting of Twitter wasn't because he saw a system that should be improved, his problem with Twitter was that he was addicted to it and he took ideological issue with it and didn't like the way it made him
feel. As many people have written, it's not even believed that he actually wanted to buy it, he just had a moment where he wanted to swing his massive economic schlong at it because he could. He does that.
But aside from not liking what Twitter was censoring, unlike banks, cars, and space, what is the big failure to innovate that Twitter was dragging on?? What is the dumbfuck obvious problem to solve that is only not being solved because no one is arrogant enough to believe that they can take on the establishment?
Also, why would Musk buy Twitter to challenge it? That isn't the Musky way. His strategy would normally be to create a competitor and do the same thing but better and leaner. Which actually could have been done. He could have easily harnessed the right wing and built a whole new Twitter from the ground up with a team of true-believer Libertarian software geniuses, giving them stock options and driving them to work 20 hours a day. And it would have cost a hell of a lot less than 40B.
But that's not what he did.
He's used to believing that he can build a lighter, faster plane, and breaking all of the rules to do so by surrounding himself with people determined to build a lighter, faster plane and willing to break rules and laws to get it done. But that's a VERY different process that taking over a plane and trying to reengineer it while it's flying with its existing staff who are conditioned to follow rules and laws, and who expect to see their families at least once a day.
So I actually understand the strategy. I get why he's okay losing staff, why he takes every insult along the way as evidence that he's doing things right. But what I don't see is how his approach works without the army of true believer nerds that he's used to.
What is the mission? Who is going to believe in it? Who is going to actually grind, working until 4am every day, getting to the state of delirium where all common sense disappears and increasingly unhinged, but occasionally fucking brilliant ideas are constantly being generated?
The 4D chess is his ability to see inefficiency, his profound arrogance to believe that he can fix it, his absolute resistance to criticism, his lack of fear of failure, and his endless source of genius ideas to pick from. All he's ever had to do was be able to identify good and bad ideas and lack the fear, humility, and "common sense" to question whether he really can outdo the big players.
But how does that approach work when there isn't a clear problem to fix and there isn't an army of true believer geniuses to perpetually churn innovative ideas?
And how does that approach work with 40B on the line?
That's where I really get stuck. I can grasp the pressure of startups, of funding rounds, runways of cash running out, and IPOs. I get the stakes there. But what does this 40B actually mean for Musk? That's what I can't grasp.
He's not afraid of failure. If Twitter totally collapses, he can blame it on Twitter being flawed from the beginning and external forces like the mysterious Jews targeting him because he's just too awesome and they can't handle it. This isn't his baby, this is a bad actor he tried to save the world from. Whether he transforms it or tanks it, he succeeds either way.
But what does losing 40B even mean to him? I can't wrap my mind around what those stakes actually mean for someone in his position.
Ultimately though, reading about early X.com in particular has given me a lot of clarity that a lot of this behaviour isn't him being reactive or having a meltdown, this is all systematically part of what has made him successful in the past. He's doing exactly what he's been conditioned to do. It is very specifically the more unhinged parts of his personality that have allowed him to be so successful.
But does any of it work with Twitter? I'm not sure.
