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practical_romantic  2yr ago (text post)   3914 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 23, 2022

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What do you think motivates Elon Musk to do some of the weird things he does? He has a lot of tweets that feel like /r/iamverysmart material, like saying chess is a simple game and now that we have computers games like Polytopia are way better. Or how he tried to buy twitter, then back out of it after already signing a contract saying he would leading twitter to sue him to force him to buy. Or offering his analysis of the Ukraine-Russian war on twitter, which even if you would agree the broad strokes of his suggestion were good, Twitter's really not a good platform to share nuanced geopolitical analysis to try to encourage peace.

Is he just doing stuff for attention? Does he think he's genuinely making a world a better place with those actions? Does he have some sort of social media manager planning this stuff to keep his name in the news and stock price high? Is he just bored and tweeting/making impulse purchases to pass the time, like what everyone else does just on a much larger scale? For the life of me I don't know why he does what he does.

Or offering his analysis of the Ukraine-Russian war on twitter, which even if you would agree the broad strokes of his suggestion were good, Twitter's really not a good platform to share nuanced geopolitical analysis to try to encourage peace.

I don’t think he is in position to significantly influence the Russia-Ukraine war in any case, but that way, at least, when the dust settles he can point at his tweets and present himself as a benevolent figure who tried to save lives.

He's was already influencing things more than almost anyone else who's not a major politician or military figure with Starlink. And I'm sure he has the leverage to get in the room to talk to people who can make direct decisions, if nothing else but because he was providing that Starlink to Ukraine. Or even if he didn't, he could've written a more nuanced blog post on a substack instead of a couple short tweets.

Thinking history will prove him right and he just wants to get his prediction in early and publicly is certainly possible. I don't know if it sounds likely to me though.

He has a lot of tweets that feel like /r/iamverysmart material, like saying chess is a simple game and now that we have computers games like Polytopia are way better

A lot of his twitter posts read like a combination of normie humor and the internet-meme style of acting quirky / dumb in a wholesome way for laughs. Maybe he posts them because people like it and he gets attention (and this helps in other ways - tesla meme stock etc), maybe he genuinely finds the memes funny and his wacky observations to be true (and overstates them for effect, like everyone else on twitter does). das baby!

For the russia/ukraine thing - "Twitter's really not a good platform to share nuanced geopolitical analysis to try to encourage peace" - he probably does think he's being useful in that specific case, and that's just him being wrong, but 'person smart in one area is less smart in other area' is pretty universal.

So I'll just offer my response on Musk's points...

Chess isn't a simple game. But it is a solved game at the lower levels. The winner of an amateur match is going to be whoever spent more time studying chess books.

Musk has better things to spend his time on, but doesn't want a bunch of mediocre people running around bragging that they beat him at chess.

So he tweets that to avoid the whole situation.

His Twitter purchase is an interesting topic, and there's a lot of speculation. But keep in mind that there were left wing groups planning to go to court to stop the purchase, and around that time tech stocks took a big hit.

So it was probably a mix of trying to get a lower price, replacing funding that had backed out, and waiting to see if the DOJ anti trust division was going to come after him.

As for Ukraine, this is pretty straightforward. Western governments have committed over $100 billion dollars to help Ukraine, and lots of groups have gotten in on the grift. Weapons developers are getting money to fund new systems to "help Ukraine" that won't be ready for years. If you dig, I'm sure you'll find a bunch of lefty groups getting big bucks for dubious services.

No one expects any of them to work for free.

But Starlink was providing critical communications services for free and it's clear that everyone was happy to leave them holding the bag. Musk just wanted to get paid for services or for the war to end.

So it's not for attention. He's just trying to advance his interests in various ways.

But it is a solved game at the lower levels. The winner of an amateur match is going to be whoever spent more time studying chess books.

There's a lot more to chess than memorizing openings and specific tactical patterns, practicing and being able to see moves into the future matters a lot too. Also, Polytopia's not different in that the person with the knowledge/practice advantage will probably win.

Musk has better things to spend his time on, but doesn't want a bunch of mediocre people running around bragging that they beat him at chess.

Has that been happening?

Chess is a lot less in a sense that very crude algorithm which evaluates trees is enough to beat an average human, because of low branching quotient and it's a perfect information game. Games with incomplete information require more complex AI.

Has that been happening?

I'm just guessing.

He's a dude who guessed right three times and who's early/mid/late career fuckups were either prevented by his partners or bailed out by the government, and now he thinks every one of his ideas is gold.

Dude looks at his track record of having the biggest social credit score and thinks he is jobs/gates/ford/carnegie; not realizing that he really, really isn't.

Steve Jobs delivered inconsequential slick electronics mostly now notable as vectors for addictive apps and weird egregores and destructive social networks, Musk staked his personal wealth at saving space launch business and somehow did not fail at that, and wasn't "bailed out" by government.

If you win a contract for launches for the government at a competitive price, that's not a bailout.

They are really not comparable at all.

SpaceX has never and probably will never make a profit without government contracts; and it is also the thing I love most that musk has ever spearheaded. It is a frankly stupid business idea though, and if he stopped making decisions about his fucking moronic dick extension heavy lifters the company would probably be much more functional. Him being in charge of space X instead of just writing the checks almost certainly has made the company worse, not better.

Basically, I really really REALLY hope that crewed starship only exists in rendering software and isn't eating up attention and capital.

He (IMO) has three meaningful contributions to human progress; with every other action he has taken of neutral or negative value: He has succefully marketed EVs as sexy instead of lame, he has plowed a big pile of money into decreasing dollars/ozs to orbit, and he has made some long bets on innovative manufacturing techniques re. casting large structural members that I think will pay off long term.

Everything else he has done ranges from boondogle ->scam -> half-baked->purely exists to siphon public money.

He has succefully marketed EVs as sexy instead of lame

This one is interesting because of how little it actually took. A large part of it was just making a regular ass sedan at a time when other manufacturers were making their EVs conspicuously ugly (so you can show everyone how much you care about the environment).

So little, but apparently impossible for those existing manufacturers.

SpaceX has never and probably will never make a profit without government contracts;

You have some good write-up on why their business model with Starlink is inherently unprofitable ? It does seem somewhat preposterous.

Also, I don't think you are right, they have something like 2/3rds of the commercial launch market.

his fucking moronic dick extension heavy lifters the company would probably be much more functional.

Why? The engines work, are vastly better than anything else on account of the physical properties of methane. Amazing lsp too.

If the system works, it's going to be possible to put 100 tons of cargo, on the moon, for cca 60 million dollars (you have to refuel in high orbit like 4 times), so something like 1% of the cost of a Saturn V launch.

Him being in charge of space X instead of just writing the checks almost certainly has made the company worse, not better.

HOW!! He founded the company, it's his baby. That company now launches the most into orbit, more than the United Launch Alliance (founded by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, known for their reliance on govt contracts). At some points he's been launching more or less than the entire Chinese space industry.

People use the argument 'oh the engineers do the work and Musk took credit' - well who hired the engineers? Who set the standards and made the big decisions? Who created the culture? Musk did. I won't say he's a paragon of virtue but he clearly knows how to found and run a rocket company. He personally interviewed the first few hundred employees.

SpaceX has never and probably will never make a profit without government contracts

Yeah, it's the government who funds the space industry, they're the biggest costumer. If he got the contracts out of corruption I get criticizing him for this, but he just offered the best product to the buyer. The buyer just happens to be the government.

Him being in charge of space X instead of just writing the checks almost certainly has made the company worse, not better.

There are lots of groups working on space projects, but SpaceX stands out. I don't actually know what exactly his role is, but it could just be finding talented people and putting them in important roles to make decisions for him, and that'd still be a very valuable contribution.

To be honest that comment about chess is way more amusing and meaningful in the context. He was just firing back at Gary Kasparov who called Musk an idiot. Kasparov is a bit of a clownish autist figure (soviet chess hero spends his later years trying and failing to gain political prominence) and an easy target to bully. I chuckled when I saw that tweet.

I think Kasparov deserves some respect, taking a stand against Putin isn't clownish.

He is quite a bit more than a generic Putin opposition figure. Kasparov was one of the prominent cheerleaders of Yeltsin in his 1996 oligarch campaign.

For about a decade now he has been totally dependent on western establishment sponsors as well as some old timey oligarchs and just a mouthpiece for unlimited confrontation. Two quotes from Wikipedia:

About Sochi

Kasparov called upon politicians to refuse to attend the games and the public to pressure sponsors and the media, such that Coca-Cola, for example, could put "a rainbow flag on each Coca-Cola can" and NBC could "do interviews with Russian gay activists or with Russian political activists"

And current day

He said that Russia should be "thrown back into the Stone Age to make sure that the oil and gas industry and any other sensitive industries that are vital for survival of the regime cannot function without Western technological support."

He is play acting as member of some sort of cabinet in exile right now, controlled by Khodorkovsky. Probably the worst of the oligarchs that raped and destroyed Russia for incredibly shameless quick profiteering and ended any prospects of liberal democracy in Russia. So yeah, he is a clown and there is a reason nobody takes the guy seriously.

What do you think motivates Elon Musk to do some of the weird things he does? He has a lot of tweets that feel like /r/iamverysmart material, like saying chess is a simple game and now that we have computers games like Polytopia are way better.

Give a guy unlimited money , a lot of free time, and the biggest platform in the world. It's like the plot of an Adam Sandler movie but real life sorta.

Give a guy unlimited money , a lot of free time, and the biggest platform in the world. It's like the plot of an Adam Sandler movie but real life sorta.

The only other billionaires who act remotely like this that I know are Kanye and Trump, who I think are both in very different mental states from Elon. I would guess Elon's closer to Bezos and Gates. The others do stuff like philanthropy or partying on yachts, which both seem like much better decisions to do with billions of dollars than tweet dumb stuff.

a lot of free time

This is the exact opposite of everything that gets reported about his work schedule. And in this context, you can't even count all his free time as "thinking up shit to say on Twitter" time, you have to subtract his social life too, after which point it's easy to see why his Twitter feed is a mess; there's barely enough time left for the "say on Twitter" and sadly not enough time for the "thinking".

A normal person would notice this and stop saying crazy shit, though, so the question "why doesn't Musk?" remains. I'd guess it's some combination of a manic personality (natural? seems like it's been going on too long to be drug-fueled?), foolish induction from extreme data (if everything you touch has been turning to gold, wouldn't you want to believe that's all because you have a Magic Touch, ignoring the power of dumb luck + vagaries of the market?), and ... well, not-so-foolish strategy. A guy who was just like Musk but did stop himself from doing crazy shit would have retired after cashing in on PayPal, he wouldn't have tried to revolutionize the auto industry and make the existing space industry obsolete, and then we'd never have even learned his name. The amount of suffering Musk incurs from crazy shit that backfires seems to be well outweighed by the benefit he's gotten from crazy shit that didn't, so it's not entirely unreasonable that he never learned to stop.

A normal person would notice this and stop saying crazy shit

You seem to be conflating the senses of normal that are "average person", "sensible person who is correct", and "person who follows social mores". But ... normal people in the first sense constantly say very dumb things on twitter (who do you think is liking and retweeting all the "culture war" stuff), smart correct people are often wrong and also sometimes go against the mainstream and are right, and should publicize that.

after which point it's easy to see why his Twitter feed is a mess; there's barely enough time left for the "say on Twitter" and sadly not enough time for the "thinking".

Musk's twitter rants aren't that much less coherent than the opinions of plenty of professional political commentators, thinkers, etc. Extremely intelligent people, mathematicians, physicists, artists - even those who spend a lot of time on politics - still usually have some variety of standard-ish political beliefs, whether that be republican, democrat, socialist, including many of the dumb parts. It's not obvious Musk's claims are any dumber than most peoples', or even many pundits' (though they are dumb) - when @TrumpJew2 says the same thing about ukraine, they just get 5k likes, instead of everyone dogpiling it for being dumb.

There's a "Drunken Boxer" Style that works very well for prominent businessmen and celebrities... Think Trump, Kanye, and Elon...

Th "Drunken Boxer" either isn't drunk, or is a martial artist who's vastly less drunk than he looks, but he feigns drunkenness to the point of almost falling over to get his opponents to lower their guard, or taunt, and create openings...

You have and/or feign instability, have a crack team backing you up, and then you wind up coming out of situations with way more than you should have ever been able to realistically negotiate out of it... because none of your adversaries could actually gauge what your intentions where, couldn't assess what were the points where they should have pushed or played hardball... and then you get insane openings where none of the republican frontrunners will challenge Trump (the main frontrunner) because they all assume its a publicity stunt and won't waste ammunitition on a guy who won't be there in a month, or Hillary directing all her media allies to pump him because she thinks he's a joke and is worried she might have to debate Rand Paul on policy.

Insane openings no other businessman or candidate would get, but that is just handed to him because he's both thought a fool, and those smart enough to realize he's not a complete fool still have no idea what he actually wants and whether or not they should be trying to deny it to him.

.

Now of course you can attribute too much 4d chess to this... how much is trump just being boisterous and good at playing the media + dumb luck... might Kanye actually just be bipolar... etc. But these people have teams behind them who aren't insane even if the front man might be, and you'll get this dynamic just out of that...

Elon is by far the most likely of these figures to do it consciously. He's the most successful businessman of them, has been a successful businessman for decades, and pours tons into his media game, despite being the one with the least need for media presence... he isn't a politician or celebrity. He's a tech/car CEO. Can you even name the CEO of Toyota from memory? How about Salesforce or Raytheon?

And yet he's out their playing crazy on TV when he could be relaxing with his money and taking a break from the office.

.

You notice you don't know if he even wants to own twitter? None of us do. That's a very powerful negotiating position.

The way I see it there's 2 -3 possibilities.

Elon put himself in this position with billions of his dollars on the line, that's a calculated move... all of this was almost certainly gone over by teams of people before he announced and was likewise poured over for weeks and months before even the preliminary stuff was signed.

So there's 3 possibilities:

A) He wants Twitter and is trying to avoid having the purchase blocked. B) He doesn't want twitter but wanted to create a "mask off" political story where he could play victim of censorship and institutional corruption C) Either outcome is agreeable to him, and he's oscillating back and forth to see how much damage/profit he can get out of it.

Whenever he gets close to getting twitter suddenly a major institution Twitter itself, the media, SEC, Biden security state make an announcement to try and block it... but when he signals he doesn't want twitter all those same institutions try to force the sale out of anger/recognition of an enemy, to try and punish him/extract resources out of him... Well if he's had his ducks in a row from the start and they're just being reactive, (which is likely since he's initiated the whole affair and had the best lawyers looking at it the whole time (whereas the people discussing a security review, or the twitter team are at most reacting within weeks)

Then its very likely every time he 180s and all these institutions shift 180 as well to try to make him pay, punish him, set an example... There's a very good chance his negotiating power increases on both ends.

For example the security review would probably give him an off-ramp if the market shifts and he doesn't want to buy, but doesn't want to pay the 1 billion damages he didn't back out, state department blocked him (how scandalous) or every legal trick the twitter team uses to try and hurt him in the trial for backing out ... '"Your honour we're even willing to assist him with the loan a 500 million value we don't have to"' Oh really!?

Its very likely his negotiating position is improving every twist this takes if he's done it right and planned it out well... which given he and his lawyers initiated it and his budget exceeds almost every other actor... probably.

Sometimes rich guys are dumb and impulsive, like a lot of people.

The drunken boxer stuff… I worked in the M&A industry for a decade. Watching Musk sign away his right to due diligence, then try and worm out of the deal, citing concerns that would have normally been addressed during due diligence, watching the share price drop with the rest of the market while Musk is locked in at the top, and now a judge (most-likely) dragging the sale across the finish line, has been some lovely schadenfreude. A-plus, chef’s kiss stuff.

Also, your info on the Feds blocking the deal is wrong. Musk is on the hook to resolve any objections, while Twitter can continue to demand their bag. Musk wanted to be Billy Big Balls and come in with a big, big offer containing terms Twitter’s board couldn’t refuse. And, they didn’t.

Large Twitter shareholders right now: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9Rd-FfKdcc8

Yeah this is what gets me. The "drunken boxer" strategy sounds the most likely and elegant, except for the fact that as far as I understand business deals, there's no actual possible advantage to actually be gained here from Musk's behaviour.

I think seeing someone do some enormously talented and exceptionally dumb things makes people try to collapse them down into someone whose stupid moves are all 4D chess maneuvers or whose smart moves are all dumb luck. The reality is probably just that someone can be very intelligent in some areas and inept in others.

For the life of me I don't know why he does what he does.

I can understand it very easily.

"I made it, I am the richest man in the world! I am universal genius, I understand it all, I can do everything, I can solve all problems of the world!"

"The world is ungrateful? The world does not want my advice? It only proves how stupid they are, and how smart I am!"

I am sure you met such people IRL, people who think genuine success and accomplishment in their work makes them universal authority on everything (and even more people who feel like it without any accomplishment whatsoever)

I don't think there's any deeper meaning, I think he's just a shit-poster at heart. Each of your examples (or him calling that one guy a pedo, or smoking weed on Rogan, and so on) can be explained simply if he just thought it was funny and figured there wouldn't be any meaningful consequence.

He is probably autistic. If you watch his interview with Joe Rogan its evident that his behaviors and mannerisms are reminiscent of that guy who used to talk about dinosaurs too much during 2nd grade and talked about soduku too much during 7th grade.

Some people have a hard time dealing with the fact that the richest man in the world is "that guy".

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