How to be An Genius:
1. Pay $44bn for a site worth 1/2 that
2. Sack everyone who knows how it works
3. Release far-right troll army
4. Turn genuine validation into a badge of idiocy
5. Kill most of your ad revenue
6. Inflate API price to recoup money
7. Everyone stops using API and scrapes site instead
8. Massively limit the service to end scraping
9. Service is now unusable
10. Remaining advertising value destroyed
11. Kill a cornerstone of the internet
12. Lose $44bn
When I got home I thought: surely that will be on TV, it was extraordinary. But it wasn't on TV. No mention. When I next saw the client I'd been there with, they said "oh, it was normal, all PMs do it".
I'm sorry, but I can't imagine any current minister doing anything like it.
I'm not claiming Blair was unique, and my then-clients indicated he wasn't. This was what was expected from a PM: deep knowledge, incredible detail, facing everything head on. Blair, Major, Thatcher had all done it.
RussInCheshire