Dean Morrison #FBPEJul 8, 2023
Adrian Hon

Here's the thing with Elon.

At Tesla and SpaceX, he could hire engineers so passionate about electric cars and building rockets, so frustrated by the slow pace at other organisations, they willingly worked themselves to the bone and covered up for his many shortcomings. Quite how sustainable that is, we'll see.

But there are plenty of other companies with the same mission as Twitter. And software engineers are so sought after, he can't hire the best on peanuts. It can't work.

Jul 2, 2023 at 6:31pmWeb
Show threadDave's DadJul 2, 2023
@adrianhon It isn't working.... least not very well.
Show threadMichel van BaalJul 2, 2023
@adrianhon it could be even more subtle: I have the hunch that the success of spacex lies a bunch of ambitious engineers, who managed to get him to open the financial/politcal doors they couldn’t, by cleverly feeding his ego in thinking he was ‘the master space engineer’. That scenario can never work at Twitter.
Show threadAdrian HonJul 2, 2023
@MichelvanBaal definitely possible!
Show threadDave T-WJul 2, 2023

@MichelvanBaal @adrianhon SpaceX thrived because they had excellent partners and a tight regulatory framework* to be able to do *anything*. And behind the mad genius energy that Elon brought, proper grownups like Tom Mueller, Hans Koenigsmann and above all, COO Gwynne Shotwell.

*There is a strong concern that they've been cavalier about the permissions they received for Boca Chica, compared to what they ended up doing. That's risky as negative public perception will eventually require government action.

Show threadHairyChrisJul 3, 2023

@davoloid @MichelvanBaal @adrianhon The whole Starship vanity project may well do for SpaceX.

Regularly trashing nature reserves is not a good look.

Show threadRaphaelJul 2, 2023

@adrianhon "Quite how sustainable that is, we'll see."

Well, in the case of SpaceX, it already seems to have led to "SpaceX Spaceship Crashes" joining "Unrest in the Middle East", "Gridlock over US Federal Budget", and "Prominent Religious Conservative Gets Caught Being Freaky" among the news media's evergreen headlines.

I don't know enough about regular Teslas to comment on them, but the self-driving variety seems to be well in "it would be funny if it wouldn't be so horrible"-territory, too.

Show threadJay Reding 🇺🇦Jul 2, 2023

@adrianhon I think that’s right. Tesla was once the only company making EVs that didn’t suck. That’s no longer true. (I was going to get a Tesla but bought a Hyundai Ioniq 5 and love it.)

SpaceX is still the only company with reusable rockets. No one else is close at the moment, and Starship is going to be a quantum leap ahead.

Twitter is just a social networking site, and not doing anything different than MySpace, FB, Insta, etc.

Show threadMarkJul 2, 2023
@adrianhon I thought he made all the designs and wrote all the code himself when things got off track.
Show threadPēteris KrišjānisJul 2, 2023
@adrianhon and Twitter in the end is not technical marvel, there is nothing unique about it. It is achievable by teams of engineers elsewhere, even using free software / open source stack.
Show threadDr David NichollJul 2, 2023
@adrianhon yeah but he’s a Fellow of the Royal Society….what were they DRINKING when they came up with that 🤪https://royalsociety.org/people/elon-musk-13829/
Fellow Detail Page | Royal Society

Explore the history of the Royal Society, including our motto and discover our timeline of key events.

Show threadBrynJul 3, 2023
@adrianhon And the real engineering mission at Twitter is ultimately ad delivery.
Show threadCockneyLaurieJul 8, 2023
@adrianhon
It's worse than that...
The first thing he did was sack all the folk running the place cos he's so self obsessed he thought he knew better than the folk who'd actually been running the place