Technology

So, for a long time I've believed Elon is actually pretty dumb. He's impulsive, was bad at programming, and frequently gets facts/figures absurdly wrong

But then there's that chat log between him and other billionaires... It circled around the idea of private companies bring free to shape social media being an existential threat

He's tanked Twitter and publicly boasts about how he turned it around and made it profitable through actions that drove people away from the platform. There's no way the numbers work from what we knew before it went private, and they've stopped paying their bills - his claims are almost certainly false

And yet, social media companies are listening - frankly, they probably don't care if it's true. If rich shareholders believe it, then by copying his methods their stock price will jump. Reddit and discord have started new initiatives that piss off their users since then... None of the methods will immediately collapse a network, but they're generally targeted towards driving away both power users and rockstar employees. It will starve the networks of content over time, leading to a tower of babble moment where the platform disperses-leaving smaller and fewer locuses of control on pubic discourse

So I keep coming back to this idea - is he a doing a zero-requiem and becoming the villain to inoculate us as a species against control by billionaires?

But then I think back to his ego, and think he's probably just blundering a role he's unqualified for.

But then, he does something else so dumb it seems like an intentional fumble, and it gets me thinking again