Make a list of goals (including things like protecting one’s self from health risks, legal risks, etc), pencil out how much it your annual expenses are, and project your cash flow until age 100.
If your investments can afford your goals, then quit or scale back. Head over to Bogleheads forums where this situation is frequently addressed.
Musk has a long history of attacking journalists who write stories critical about him or his company, and he famously called a guy who helped save a bunch of kids a pedophile for criticizing his ill-advised efforts to help out. When he was a kid, he was pushed down a flight of stairs for making fun of a fellow student's father's suicide, and Musk's father was not on his son's side.
Elon did everything in his power to ruin the life of a whistle-blower. After they were able to identify the source of the leak, Martin Tripp, someone who had a personal vendetta against Tripp called in a false police report that he was planning a mass shooting. I cannot say who that someone was, but both Tesla and Musk himself were spreading rhetoric that Tripp was a dangerous individual.
If you are anything like me, you were fooled for a long time because of SpaceX.
It's become clearer and clearer however that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. There are all sorts of reports around now that SpaceX management is very effective at building a firewall around Elon to stop him doing a lot of damage.
But his politics, narcissism, deception, misrepresentation and incompetence actually aren't new. Lying about his education, his role in Paypal, founding tesla and so on. It goes back decades.
Personally I'm not surprised at Elon's temper tantrum and banning people who are mean to him on Twitter. What saddens me however is how many stans and apologists ("dick riders" if you will) Elon still has. Elon does not care about you. You will never be Elon. For the record, this is a general "you", not who I'm replying to specifically.
A significant fraction of our ascendant elite are overworked, overmedicated and alone. Musk is likely the most critical of the afflicted by Kayne syndrome.
It's a pretty obvious midlife crisis. Dude's baby mama left him for a trans woman. His own gender-reaffirming hair implants turned out all wrong. Tough time to be Elon.
> Sweeney said he hasn't received any notification of legal action, and the last time his bot tweeted anything was Dec. 12, "which is not last night, so I don’t get how that’s connected.”
Oh, that may be why Musk is so anti trans all of a sudden, first his child disowns him and now he loses his lover to a trans person. Taking Musk's ego into account some kind of response is inevitable.
Hmm..
- not the world's largest auto company by a long shot. not even in the top 10.
- had to borrow billions (at least 13B) from banks to buy twitter (banks that now want out)
- twitter not remotely the biggest social media company in the world. again.. likely not even in the top 10.
I'm not quite sure how I'm defending him. I don't really like him, especially after he voiced his opinions on Ukraine and Taiwan, I hope he loses all his money. And I'll never touch a Tesla.
All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.
99% of companies would have imploded at the same pace.
Offending everyone who matters that runs the product you just bought and terrorizing all your employees is a fast and easy road to completely imploding any company.
Indeed. I agree with most if not all of the changes Musk made, but it was obvious to anyone that he made them in the worst possible way on the worst possible schedule. He couldn't be doing more damage if he was deliberately trying to tank the company.
He did that idiocy because company wasn't profitable in the first place tho.
Like, yeah, if he did that to well functioning company it would fall apart too, but Twitter wasn't a well-functioning company. And by that I mean "he would ruin it slower".
> All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally.
Except that's not true at all. What he did is saddle it with a bunch of debt and fire of a bunch of really-poorly-considered cosr cutting and revenue enhancement ideas that clearly weren’t thought through or part of a coherent strategy.
He might have and end-game vision, but he had no plausible roadmap to deal with the sucking wounded he inflcted with the acquisition, much less to get to his end-game vision.
No sorry. When you have people on Twitter claiming that they should be fixing 10+ years of technical debt to improve performance. And the platform is overrun by bots and spam, issues are not resolved. Complaints dating back 10 years are not addressed in any way. There’s obviously internal problems.
If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter.
Engineers not being good is probably not the issue. But I’m pretty sure it comes from higher up.
It’s also evident that Twitter was poorly managed by the fact it’s pretty much never made a profit.
>>If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter.
It is not just tech debt per se. In larger companies most middle managers have no incentive to fix things for the long term. And lack of automation means they get to hire more people, which is good for them, as it expands their fiefdom.
I know one company in California which hires H1-Bs by the thousands, many even make it to Green cards. Their work- Somebody sends a bunch of values from the India office, they manually edit shell scripts(written ages ago, by some dude who has long left), run it, get the values and enter those values into some internal application. The thought that all this could be done by web api's didn't cross their mind. Never mind that automating this simple thing could help cut employee count by the thousands. Another place that I heard of, similar things but with SQL. The whole thing could be automated. But somebody wrote a bunch of shell scripts and left shop. Now people need to take outputs from SQL scripts and feed to the next ones. And then cut paste the data into some system.
In the woke world that we live in, where everybody is supposed to be special, and we are supposed to lie to ensure nobody gets hurt feelings. Most people forget, these jobs should have never existed at the first place. Many a times cutting them actually leads to more profits, and saves lots of management effort. Sure people losing jobs is sad, but if you are doing a job that shouldn't exist at the first place, you should likely move before you are let go.
The world is full of wasted effort, it is many times even tolerated for all sorts of reasons. But some times it is not.
He lost me on Ukraine and Taiwan too. Free democratic societies allowed him to become something. Dictators and Communism for everyone that stands in his way towards more wealth.
I was determined to buy a Tesla. Now we placed an order for a VW ID.4.
I really don't get why people dislike his Ukraine stance.
"Beat up Russia a bunch, make peace and throw Russia a bone by letting them keep Crimea." seems like the death minimising stance to me and in the best interests of the inhabitants of the each region.
If Russia gets anything out of this war it would be anything but death minimising. It will signal to them, and all other states, that aggressive wars are viable. They are in Ukraine because war has worked out for them in Georgia and Chechnya. You are literally espousing a pro-imperialism stance masquerading as a moderate position.
Because Russia has been taking pieces of land from Ukraine since 2014. If you'd hand over more land to Russia now, they'd invade again in a couple of years, with their army stronger than it is now.
Besides that, appeasement has never worked against aggressors in the past. It basically looks like Musk is calling for another Munich Agreement. It shows a complete lack of understanding of history, and of international relations.
Because it is dumb, insensitive to people losing their lives on the the front lines and makes it seem like Russia is _actually willing_ to get out of Ukraine if only it is allowed to keep Crimea, which it clearly is not?
I was a fan for all that Musk did with SpaceX. Single-handedly dropping costs to LEO and creating a civilian / commercial space industry -- mind blowingly impressive, and willed into existence by one man.
When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.
I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.
I get the impression that others at SpaceX moderate and "manage" him.
Let him get distracted with micro-managing whatever cool project is currently takes his fancy, while they do the more boring job of keeping the company running, and making sure the customers are happy.
I bet these people are extra happy when he is focusing on projects that don't have customers yet, like Starship/BFR.
Twitter might actually be the first time were he has 100% control over a large company without someone in the background moderating his more wild impulses.
Gwynne Shotwell is the too seldom acknowledged hero of SpaceX, who has played exactly that role of keeping the lights on, moderating Musk’s worse impulses, and managing him into less destructive directions. It’s been evident for years.
There are similar people at Tesla, who focus on the endless operational tweaking and improvement that Musk finds boring, and who slowly fixed all the most critical issues on the Model 3 line while Musk increasingly took to politics and social media.
I’m not one of those who believes Musk hasn’t done anything or played no part in SpaceX or Tesla’s success, because that’s clearly false. But he also hasn’t been the sole genius responsible for all the success or infallible. But too many people have made him believe he was and we’re now seeing the result of that hubris and ignorance.
Yet, Gwynne seems happy to lie about suborbital freight for him, and about colonizing Mars. I have not encountered anyone prominent at Tesla supporting his lies about self-driving (though that doesn't mean none do).
That's a bit ridiculous. Buying Twitter for $44bn was entirely his fault (and I think, a very stupid decision) and he does seem to be running the company into the ground, but were the fundamentals of the business solid before he got there? Did it ever justify its share price? Is ad revenue a sustainable business model? Was it going to remain profitable for long enough for someone who bought in e.g. 2020 to make a good return?
If you go to market and buy a lame horse then flog it into the ground, that's entirely your fault, but it's not like the horse was ever going to race well.
I think the analogy is he bought a house that needed a new foundation and he tried to fix it with kerosene and fire. The issues may well have been fixable but he had no sense of what the issues were to begin with, just his ego-driven edgelord perspective.
It was a rhetorical question: for me the answer is no. TWTR apparently justified its share price to someone on the market, but I think it's been overvalued since IPO.
I have no idea if TSLA is overvalued or undervalued. I don't know enough about the automotive industry, renewable energy regulations, or batteries to even guess.
Why? The business was weeks away from shutting down in 2015 under original ownership, Twitter looked to be saved from 2018 - 2019, but not really, seeing as 2018-2019 were the only 2 profitable years for Twitter ever
Twitter was leaking money for 2020 and 2021, the trend looked to be continuing for 2022, they had an OK first quarter, and maybe they were going to continue to do well, but I sincerely doubt it seeing how every single tech stock has performed this year. Q2 alone blew away $344 million loss compared to Q1's $513 million gain. I also sincerely doubt Twitter was being led well by looking at their earnings reports and the money hole that punctured the company coffers in 2020Q2. The middling performance through 2021 continued when that should've been Twitter's best years, all other tech stocks even ad agencies were printing money, why was Twitter not doing the same?
I think Twitter board's best decision they ever made was offloading the company off to Elon, cut their losses for a clearly failing company with little to no headwind coming their way for the next few quarters at minimum.
But I do need to know why does Elon get the brunt of the blame for Twitter's presumed downfall? Seems like Twitter was already a falling knife by itself
> why does Elon get the brunt of the blame for Twitter's presumed downfall
A few reasons
- he's greatly accelerating its decline in a highly visible and embarrassing way
- he got ripped off. $44b is a hilariously bad deal. He could have saved a few billion and used it to run twitter, at a minor loss, for many years.
- and lastly: he tried to catch a falling knife and is standing around pretending he isn't bleeding. Considering the hubris he has put on display over the past 5 years or so, everyone's taking a moment to enjoy the show.
Are you really "getting ripped off" if you came in with a ridiculously high offer (when no one asked) and they accepted it because they'd be crazy not to?
"I've got this old beater that I'm tired of working out of every day."
Your food truck sucks and your food is no better. You should sell churros.
"Churros don't really match our poboy sandwiches."
I can fix this, I'll just buy you out for a million dollars.
"... ok, sounds good to me."
What do you mean the truck is only worth about three grand? I want out of this deal.
It's the right thing to do with a sinking ship that needs to take big risks. Twitter's previous shareholders are surely very happy with how much money he's taken out of bankers' pockets and put into theirs.
Your breathless narration of that data is certainly a master class in spin. Maybe the company was performing far below what would be possible. But it is hard to look at the data and conclude that there was any imminent risk of its demise.
Twitter posted a net loss of $221 million in 2021, and a $1.1 billion loss in 2020.
Quarters are only good for forecasting and deciding what to do. Financial year is what matters overall. That’s an indicator of the overall success for the year.
In retrospect, most online-only tech companies had a great time during the unusual thing, so much so many of them made the mistake of hiring like the same trends would continue
I mean, Twitter was a slowly sinking ship which he turned into a quickly sinking ship. The guy is entirely to blame for the current situation - engineers and advertisers fleeing - but it’s not like buying it was a clever move in the first place.
Twitter was already failing, just in slow motion. 10 out of the last 12 years, including last year, the company lost money. I never saw the management team propose or execute on a legitimate path to sustainable profitability, either. Elon is just driving into the ground faster than the largely incompetent leadership team before him did.
So what you are saying, is the prior business model did not work, and firing the prior management team, getting rid of complacent employees, and striking out on a new path, is a good idea?
Twitter was on pace to lose billions without him. They were doing massive layoffs under Parag, extrapolating Facebook and Snapchat results gets you Twitter’s anemic last reports as a public company even without the overhang of Musk
Yeah, why do you think they accepted so quickly? They tried to get Wall Street to be interested and they turned their nose up extremely quickly, and that was right after a 50% price drop
That's two figures more than actual. Reportedly, Musk paid Agrawal $42M and spent $120M total on golden parachutes, which is still only low 9 figures. Still obscene. Most employers do not give severance to fired former employees. They were in charge of Twitter while it was losing billions. They should have paid him. He could have saved money right there by giving them the address to the unemployment office.
