The trolling of Musk goes on


I might as well join the pile on of trolling of Elon Musk. A prankster calling themselves a ‘projection activist’ projected a rolling caption with insults onto the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.

This prank was no doubt timed to coincide with Musk’s statement that he would be in the building over the weekend to meet personally with the remaining engineers in the company who were commanded to come there at short notice.

It is not clear what would be accomplished by such meetings. There is no way that Musk could properly gauge the quality of a person by seeing a few lines of code during a brief meeting, especially since Twitter is not like any of the companies he already runs and has an entirely different culture. It seems like Musk is jerking people around just because he can. It is a petty tyrant move whose only result is likely to make even more people quit.

There is an old saying that people do not leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. And, boy, is Musk a lousy manager, at least as far as Twitter is concerned.. How the other companies he runs have survived so far beats me.

Comments

  1. Oggie: Mathom says

    Why does it seem like many people in the world (Musk, Putin, Jones, Rhodes, Irving, etc) are in a contest to determine which one of them can be a bigger and more famous idiot than Trump? The world seems to me to be filled with people who are trying to make Trump and his antics look mainstream.

  2. xohjoh2n says

    @1:

    Norrington: You are without a doubt the worst pirate I’ve ever heard of.
    Captain Jack Sparrow: But you have heard of me.

  3. Dunc says

    It is not clear what would be accomplished by such meetings. There is no way that Musk could properly gauge the quality of a person by seeing a few lines of code during a brief meeting

    I think the main question he’s interested in is whether you’re prepared to acceed to such unreasonable demands or not.

  4. sonofrojblake says

    I think commenter “flex” nailed it in another thread. Musk said “hah! I’ll just buy Twitter and make it a haven for unrestricted hatefree speech!”, because he’s a nob. Then he looked into doing it, and decided “nah”, because he’s not an idiot. And then Twitter sued him and won and forced him to buy them. And this is what it looks like when you successfully force a billionaire to do something they didn’t want to do.

    I don’t buy the line that he has no idea how Twitter works and is incompetent -- this is not consistent with his demonstrated behaviours across several other successful businesses. I can believe the idea that he’s deliberately doing all this performative bad management to drive the company as it exists into non-existence, because apart from anything else -- he can afford to.

  5. John Morales says

    [OT — linguistic]

    sonofrojblake, ‘knob’ and ‘nob’ are different, though a nob can be a knob and obviously they’re homophonic.

    (In this case, it kinda works — but nobs are generally held to be upper-class, not just rich — whereas knobs are either bellends or just thickies)

    I don’t buy the line that he has no idea how Twitter works and is incompetent — this is not consistent with his demonstrated behaviours across several other successful businesses.

    Indeed. His first two startups were software companies, as I’ve noted here in an earlier post. He damn well knows how they work — that’s how he got rich in the first place. Well, technically, he used to know… but I doubt he’s forgotten.

  6. sonofrojblake says

    He damn well knows how [software companies] work — that’s how he got rich in the first place

    Well, that and, y’know, his dad’s emerald mine. Like so many others, his is not a “rags to riches” story, it’s a “riches to ludicrous riches” story.

  7. says

    I don’t buy the line that he has no idea how Twitter works and is incompetent — this is not consistent with his demonstrated behaviours across several other successful businesses. I can believe the idea that he’s deliberately doing all this performative bad management to drive the company as it exists into non-existence, because apart from anything else — he can afford to.

    The other question here is: Why are his backers allowing all this without a peep of protest? And the more I think about them, the more I’m compelled to conclude that they WANT to destroy Twitter, not just “because they can” (because, among other things they’re not the ones who can), but for some other unstated reasons, reasons more rational and probably more dangerous than Husk’s own stupid shortsighted resentment. And given that one of those backers is a Saudi Arabian prince, I’m guessing he, at least, wants to undermine and discredit a platform used by numerous critics of numerous tyrannical regimes (including his own and several US police departments).

  8. invivoMark says

    He damn well knows how [software companies] work — that’s how he got rich in the first place

    And Linus Pauling damn well knew a lot about biochemistry. Didn’t stop him from getting vitamin C wrong.

    See also: Kary Mullis, Luc Montagnier, etc.

    Prior success in one arena doesn’t preclude becoming an atrocious failure in that same arena later on.

  9. says

    Prior success in one arena doesn’t preclude becoming an atrocious failure in that same arena later on.

    Especially not when said prior success was obtained merely by bullying and threatening one’s employees to do the actual work despite unfavorable circumstances or unrealistic demands and deadlines.

  10. Yukie says

    @ 9:

    RE: “And Linus Pauling damn well knew a lot about biochemistry. Didn’t stop him from getting vitamin C wrong.[..]. Prior success in one arena doesn’t preclude becoming an atrocious failure in that same arena later on”

    Linus Pauling was right with his vitamin work. However, everyone should keep the following in mind, especially now with the Covid Scamdemic going on:

    … there are many bogus voices around who strive to distract the public from the value of vitamin C therapy and the fact that Pauling’s VALID work with vitamin C supplementation has been “falsified” by data distortions and lies, and he as a person (a double Nobel laureate) has been slandered as some deluded idiot by the criminal medical establishment and its countless quackwatch shills, lackeys, ignoramuses, and trolls for decades and it continues today, and

    … that the same corrupt criminal people (and their uninformed followers) are behind the organized suppression, lies, and half-truths spread about the value of vitamin C therapy against covid-19 — see “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room –The Holocaustal Covid-19 Coronavirus Madness: A Sociological Perspective & Historical Assessment Of The Covid “Phenomenon”” at https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html

    But you can’t discredit the facts with lies. That only exposes and discredits the liars (see link above).

    Self-righteous propagandists and blissful ignoramuses, aka stupid people, typically do not know that they must look deeper for the truth and have no clue about the nature of the official medical establishment and the world we live in so they keep spreading DISPROVED tales and lies. It’s why the world is crazy. Typically, the brainless regurgitators of official medical propaganda repeat the whole enchalata of slanderous nonsense against Pauling pushed by the medical mafia club, including the misdirecting language that “prior success in one arena doesn’t preclude becoming an atrocious failure in that same arena later on” …

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