Paul GrahamDec 19, 2022

A lot of reporters want to talk about Elon and Twitter. Instead of responding to them, I'll just post something here and see if they can find it. It will be good practice for them in using Mastodon.

I think it will be a relief to Elon to go back to focusing on cars and rockets. Those are arguably more important problems anyway. And he could still do good things for Twitter too, if he hires the right CEO.

Show threadErik 🫥🦾🧠Dec 19, 2022
@paulg Don’t really understand why he ventured into social media in the first place. It’s not an engineering problem, it’s a social one. The former Elon has proven to be pretty good at, while the latter…well everything I’ve heard suggests Elon has about a 0 EQ lol
Show threadMostly Harmless (Cam Johnson)Dec 19, 2022
@erikth2355 @paulg the product is the stock price and the brand, SpaceX still loses massive amounts of money and Tesla’s profitability is going to very difficult to maintain with rising competition and how slow they’ve been to deliver on their roadmap. Without Twitter pumps it’s hard to see how Tesla would have such an astronomical stock price, at one point more than the rest of the auto market combined
Show threadErik 🫥🦾🧠
@mostlyharmlessz @paulg so you’re saying him buying Twitter is just an attempt to maintain his viral marketing machine for tesla? i don’t doubt it but it seems really short-sided for a man like Elon
Dec 19, 2022 at 7:06pmWeb
Show threadMostly Harmless (Cam Johnson)Dec 20, 2022
@paulg @erikth2355 it’s hard to see any other reason he would want it, and his texts with the former CEO made it seem like it was an off the cuff decision.
Show threadErik 🫥🦾🧠Dec 20, 2022
@mostlyharmlessz @paulg yea it really feels like he fucked himself over and got locked into a deal he didn’t actually want