Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

Rimbo · July 27, 2023

1 hour ago, texasdago said:

Dark mode has its time and place. Sometimes its great, sometimes I hate it with a burning passion.

Yes.

1 hour ago, totallynotabuttpirate said:

Yea, it gives me a guaranteed headache. I think you have to grow up with it or something. I use night mode all the time and keep the backlight low so there's not a lot of contrast.

eh

1 hour ago, Captain Ron said:

FIFY. It's really a great mode for when you stare at a screen a lot - developers love it.

Nope.

The science isn't all that difficult.

With dark mode, there's less light entering your eyes. Which means your pupils dilate to let more light in... which decreases depth of field. So it's harder for your eyes to focus, and as your eyes move along words on the screen they have to refocus more often, increasing strain on your eyes.

If you're already in a room that's too dark, then dark mode can be helpful.

But if you're doing work during the day, and the room is too dark to use light mode comfortably, WHY ARE YOU SITTING IN A DARK ROOM? Open some windows for goodness sakes.

Basically once i got older than about 45, after half an hour of dark mode, i simply couldn't focus on the screen at all any more.

Brisketexan · July 27, 2023

38 minutes ago, NoName said:

https://mashable.com/article/xai-twitter-handle-elon-musk-x

so he took one account (xAI) and changed that OP's name to xAI_ then changed the existing xAI_ to xAI__1

at least with twitter it was for a twitter rebrand, now he's just taking accounts that relate to companies he owns.

this has to do so much for trust in the platform. if i don't own my business twitter account (example @DallsCowboys don't own @Cowboys, which is an account from 2015 with 0 tweets, 0 followers) - i am for sure going to demand that as part of my ad purchase. or what happens when someone demands that he take down the account of a critic of theirs?

so fucking dumb. so fucking elon.

+

+

Not just @x: Elon Musk also took @xAI from its original user for his AI company

Gosh. Elon seems super trustworthy, and not mercurial, juvenile, or amoral at all.

I definitely want him to create an everything app, where I can share all of my personal information with him and give him full access to all of my money in his X Bank. I can't see how anything would go wrong, like him changing the TOS on a whim to allow Elon access to my money, which now belongs equally to me and to X Bank, or anything like that. Nope, no way anything like that could ever happen.

elfenix · July 27, 2023

I like bright white backgrounds. Fuck electricity!

If you're using an LCD screen (the vast majority of computer and laptop screens as well as TVs) then setting dark mode doesn't really do anything to power consumption b/c the backlight is still going. Local dimming is a thing but it pretty much sucks for computers.

Most phones use OLED nowadays in which dark mode does reduce power consumption.

Goredho · July 27, 2023

Everything musk has promised and failed to deliver. I can't see how anyone puts faith in this guy. The only diff between him and that titanic sub CEO is that Musk was in the right place at the right time as the internet was born.

https://elonmusk.today/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

atomheartbevo · July 27, 2023

1 hour ago, NoName said:

at least with twitter it was for a twitter rebrand, now he's just taking accounts that relate to companies he owns.

1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

Gosh. Elon seems super trustworthy, and not mercurial, juvenile, or amoral at all.

I definitely want him to create an everything app, where I can share all of my personal information with him and give him full access to all of my money in his X Bank. I can't see how anything would go wrong, like him changing the TOS on a whim to allow Elon access to my money, which now belongs equally to me and to X Bank, or anything like that. Nope, no way anything like that could ever happen.

When he somehow wedges financial and banking transactions into the mix, I can only imagine the handles he will be taking, as well as what twitter will be like when people have problems and start complaining (I'm guessing they will be silenced in some way).

And speaking of financial/banking functionality added to twitter, I'm sure the advertising will be off the rails, since advertisers for like, say...bitcoin, will be trying to lure people with just one click to buy into whatever they are selling. They won't have to even consider it, since it'll be just one click away.

Francisco 2.0 · July 27, 2023

https://daringfireball.net/2023/07/translation_yaccarino_x

Translation From Hostage Code to English of X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino’s Company-Wide Memo

Spoiler

Hi team,

What a momentous weekend.

Everyone said to me, “Linda, what are you thinking? You don’t want to work for that guy. He’s crazy and impulsive. You’ve got a great job at NBC. You’ve got a great future ahead of you. If you take this job it’ll tank your career and your name will be a punchline.” Did I listen to them?

As I said yesterday, it’s extremely rare, whether it’s in life or in business, that you have the opportunity to make another big impression. That’s what we’re experiencing together, in real time. Take a moment to put it all into perspective.

It’s OK to day-drink. I am.

17 years ago, Twitter made a lasting imprint on the world. The platform changed the speed at which people accessed information. It created a new dynamic for how people communicated, debated, and responded to things happening in the world. Twitter introduced a new way for people, public figures, and brands to build long lasting relationships. In one way or another, everyone here is a driving force in that change. But equally all our users and partners constantly challenged us to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfill our great potential.

Twitter was a simple concept with profound impact.

With X we will go even further to transform the global town square — and impress the world all over again.

It’s not just you. I have no idea what’s going on either.

Our company uniquely has the drive to make this possible.

Fucking Elon.

Many companies say they want to move fast — but we enjoy moving at the speed of light, and when we do, that’s X.

According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, as an object approaches the speed of light, the object’s mass becomes infinite and so too does the energy required to move it. But this holds true, in degree, for all objects in motion, and a mind-bending aspect of special relativity is that the faster an object is moving, the more slowly it experiences time. If you were able to move at the speed of light, time wouldn’t pass at all. It would be like being damned for eternity, forever caught in the current moment, while the world moves on for everyone else.

I think about this.

At our core, we have an inventor mindset — constantly learning, testing out new approaches, changing to get it right and ultimately succeeding.

We are hemorrhaging cash and our advertisers are still fleeing.

With X, we serve our entire community of users and customers by working tirelessly to preserve free expression and choice, create limitless interactivity, and create a marketplace that enables the economic success of all its participants.

I used to run all advertising for NBCUniversal. Now I’m running an $8/month multi-level marketing scheme where the only users who’ve signed up are men who own a collection of MAGA hats.

The best news is we’re well underway.

There is no hope.

Everyone should be proud of the pace of innovation over the last nine months — from long form content, to creator monetization, and tremendous advancements in brand safety protections.

Have you seen the ads we’re running these days? Last week we were filling everyone’s timeline with ads for discount boner pill chewing gum, the punchline of which ads is that you’ll bang your lady so hard she’ll need the aid of a walker afterward. That’s a video we promoted to everyone. This week it’s anime for foot fetishists. That’s what we put in everyone’s feed, every three tweets. Or X’s, or whatever we’re now calling them. I used to book hundred-million-dollar Olympic sponsorship deals with companies like Coca-Cola and Proctor & Gamble. (Thank god for Apple.)

Our usage is at an all time high

Our owner is high as a kite.

and we’ll continue to delight our entire community with new experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.

Our focus group testing suggests that while interest in trusting this platform — which, let’s face it, is not exactly known for its reliability — for banking, of all things, is, as you’d expect, pretty low overall, it’s surprisingly high amongst people who know who Catturd is.

Please don’t take this moment for granted.

Please quit. Get out. I beg you. Leave while you can put on your resume that you worked for “Twitter”.

You’re writing history, and there’s no limit to our transformation.

As if this rebranding disaster isn’t enough, our infrastructure is crumbling. Facebook took Threads from 0 to 100 million users in under a week, without a hitch, at the same time we imposed comical rate limits on usage. I mean can you even believe that shit? I still can’t. I said to him, “Elon, we are an ad-based business. Our revenue is directly commensurate to usage. This is like running a casino and turning the slot machines off to save on the electricity bill. It makes no sense.” And Elon was like “Bots!”

And everyone, is invited to build X with us.

I think I, saw on a TV show once that a hostage was able, to signal to authorities the need for help without alerting, their captors by placing commas randomly in their sentences.

Elon and I will be working across every team and partner to bring X to the world. That includes keeping our entire community up to date, ensuring that we all have the information we need to move forward.

I found out about this name change when you did, at midnight on Saturday, and I have no idea what that fucker is going to do next or when he’s going to do it. You know this. You know that I know that you know this. But I’m going to persist with the charade that these decisions are being made by a team that I’m a leader of, because to do otherwise would be even more humiliating.

Now, let’s go make that next big impression on the world, together.

Linda

I’m so sorry.

Linda

Biff Tannen · July 27, 2023

8 hours ago, Chopper said:

Rather, Tesla created the groundswell of complaints another way – by hyping the range of its futuristic electric vehicles, or EVs, raising consumer expectations beyond what the cars can deliver.

I had to check the date on the article because of this line. Uh, it's 2023. I think most people have heard of EVs.

I've had my Model 3 since 2018 and the range was always within a few miles of what was "advertised" until maybe a year or two ago, which is expected with normal battery degradation. Maybe I just got lucky.

But god damn, Elon's a douche.

texasdago · July 27, 2023

26 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I had to check the date on the article because of this line. Uh, it's 2023. I think most people have heard of EVs.

I've had my Model 3 since 2018 and the range was always within a few miles of what was "advertised" until maybe a year or two ago, which is expected with normal battery degradation. Maybe I just got lucky.

But god damn, Elon's a douche.

So my Tesla friend kept focusing on the range part of that article and that the range is not quite what was advertised. That's not the bad part of the article. The bad part is them trying to suppress complaints and just canceling appointments on people.

conVINCEd · July 27, 2023

There was a time when I wanted a Tesla. That time has passed.

Biff Tannen · July 27, 2023

1 hour ago, texasdago said:

So my Tesla friend kept focusing on the range part of that article and that the range is not quite what was advertised. That's not the bad part of the article. The bad part is them trying to suppress complaints and just canceling appointments on people.

Oh for sure, but I guess I've just never seen or heard of the advertised range being a problem until this article. Which in turn caused all the complaints. I absolutely believe Elon did what it says he did, because fuck that guy.

Francisco 2.0 · July 27, 2023

Chopper · July 27, 2023

1 hour ago, Biff Tannen said:

I had to check the date on the article because of this line. Uh, it's 2023. I think most people have heard of EVs.

I've had my Model 3 since 2018 and the range was always within a few miles of what was "advertised" until maybe a year or two ago, which is expected with normal battery degradation. Maybe I just got lucky.

But god damn, Elon's a douche.

I don't think you're wrong.

Quote

Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles’ potential driving distance – by rigging their range-estimating software. The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers “rosy” projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts.

...

At the time Tesla programmed in the rosy range projections, it was selling only two models: the two-door Roadster, its first vehicle, which was later discontinued; and the Model S, a luxury sport sedan launched in 2012.

Reuters said it "could not determine whether Tesla still uses algorithms that boost in-dash range estimates," but reported that Tesla "last year became so inundated with driving-range complaints that it created a special team to cancel owners' service appointments." Reuters also noted that "automotive testers and regulators continue to flag the company for exaggerating the distance its vehicles can travel before their batteries run out."

atomheartbevo · July 28, 2023

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company. I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside.

Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life. As someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me, Twitter often felt siloed and bureaucratic. Dumb power plays, reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someone’s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly. You couldn’t just be a builder — you also needed to be a politician.

I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was, but there was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls because we were all beholden to the masters of mDAU and revenue growth as a public company. It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build.

Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste. Healthy debate and criticism was replaced by a default refrain of “no, that can’t be done” or “another team owns that so don’t touch it”. Teams could spend months building a feature and then some last-minute kerfuffle meant it’d get killed for being too risky.

Just talking directly to customers could turn into a turf war and create deadlocks between functions. I recall one such episode where a teammate spent a month trying to get clearance to reach out to some creators. He went through 3 layers of management and 6 different functional teams. In the end 4 executives were involved in the approval. It was insanity, and unfortunately I saw several top performers get burnt out and demoralized after exhausting experiences like that.

Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out. A high performance culture pulls everyone up, but the opposite weighs everyone down. Twitter often felt like a place that kept squandering its own potential, which was sad and frustrating to see.

The person who was best at cutting through the BS and inspiring a vision during my tenure was Kayvon Beykpour, but he wasn’t fully empowered to run the company since he wasn’t the CEO. Despite those real issues, I was lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in the business at Twitter in product, design, engineering, research, legal, BD, trust & safety, marketing, PR and more.

Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption. Those teams were very fun to be on but they felt like the exception rather than the rule.

The months of waiting for the deal to close in 2022 were particularly slow and painful; it felt like leadership hid behind lawyers and legal language as all answers about the company’s future notoriously included the phrase “fiduciary duty”. Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems.

Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic – I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company.

My take on what’s happened since then is full of lived nuance. When people ask why I stayed it’s easy to answer: optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money. From the beginning I saw that some changes Elon was going to make were smart and others were stupid, but when I’m on a team I uphold the philosophy of “praise in public and criticize in private”. I was far from a silent wallflower. I shared my opinions openly and pushed back often, both before and after the acquisition.

I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all. I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale. Although I couldn’t change the situation I did my best to shine a light on folks who were doing important work while being an emotionally supportive leader for those who were struggling to adapt to the more brutalist and hardcore culture.

In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over. The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him.

At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said. When individuals encouraged me to be careful about what I said I politely thanked them and said I would not be taking their advice. I had no interest in adding to a culture of fear or walking on eggshells around Elon. Either he would respect me for being real or he could fire me. Either outcome was okay.

I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didn’t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice.

At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it. I don’t think things had to be as difficult or dramatic as they turned out to be but I can’t say I’d bet against Elon or count him out. He’s smart and has enough money to make a lot of mistakes and then course correct when things go awry. As the largest shareholder he can tank the value in the short-term, but eventually he’ll need things to turn around.

His focus on speed is incredible and he’s obviously not afraid of blowing things up, but now the real measure will be how it get reconstructed and if enough people want the new everything app he is building. I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful.

Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence. Social networks are hard to kill but they’re not immune from death spirals.

Only time will tell what the outcome will be but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers. In the meantime, I have a lot of empathy for the employees who are working tirelessly behind the scenes, the advertisers who want a stable platform to sell their stuff on, and the customers who are experiencing chaotic updates. It’s been a madhouse. Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy but now X is run by a mercurial leader whose instinct is driven by the unique and undoubtedly weird experience of being the biggest voice on the platform.

Many of you know me from the sleeping bag incident where I slept on a conference room floor, so I figure, let’s talk about that too. Going viral was an odd and interesting experience. I was attacked by people on the left and called a billionaire bootlicker, while simultaneously being attacked by people on the right for being a working mom who was demonized as an example of a woman choosing her career over her family. Thankfully I can laugh at myself and I don’t take armchair keyboard ideologues too seriously.

Being the main character on the timeline, even for a few minutes, requires a thick skin and a strong sense of self. The real story is pretty simple. I was given a nearly impossible deadline for his first project and as the product lead I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself. So I worked round the clock alongside an amazing team spanning many timezones, and we delivered it on schedule – truly against the odds. It was intense but also fun.

Those first few months were wildly crazy but I wanted to be there and I have no regrets. Showing up and giving it your all should, in most cases, be celebrated. Obviously you can’t work at that pace forever but there are moments where bursts are mission critical. I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic.

I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode. Since I like taking on difficult challenges I found it interesting and rewarding because I was growing and learning so rapidly.

I realize our society today trends toward polarization but when it comes to this app, its owner, and its future, I am neither a fangirl nor a hater — I’m an optimistic pragmatist. This may really irritate the internet but you cannot pigeonhole me into some radical position of either loving or hating every change that’s occurred. I escaped my fundamentalist upbringing and am a free thinker these days.

Everyone can be seen as both a hero or a villain, depending on who is telling what angle of the story. Elon doesn’t deserve to be venerated or vilified. He’s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness.

I disagree with many of his decisions and am surprised by his willingness to burn so much down, but with enough money and time, something new & innovative may emerge. I hope it does.

Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received. Sure the headlines and punchlines wrote themselves but I was battle hardened by then. I knew that I’d worked in a way where I could walk out with my head held high. I have no bitterness about the Product Management team being dismantled, and it made sense for me to exit as nearly all of the remaining PMs were let go. Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed.

I’m a creative and a builder, so sooner than later I’ll jump back into a high intensity company but I’m grateful for this season of thinking, reading, traveling and being with people I love. After having time to reflect I believe more than ever that the very best outcomes flow from great leadership that combines the head and the heart. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes.

It’s a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are also some of the most isolated. I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live. Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. We’ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior. Living in an echo chamber is dangerous and being at the top makes a person even more susceptible to being surrounded by yes people when nearly everyone around you is on the payroll and somehow stands to benefit from being in your orbit.

Figuring out how to keep “better angels” around in the form of family, friends, and teammates is critical to staying on the rails and enduring intense ups and downs. Everyone needs to hear hard truths sometimes and if you fire all the people who speak up then the reality distortion field may just turn into a vortex. I was drawn to Twitter because I’m obsessed with the problem of loneliness and connection between people. I find it fascinating & troubling that humans are getting lonelier as we simultaneously create a world that’s both safer and wealthier. I don’t believe that trade-off has to exist, which is why I keep returning to that theme in my personal and professional life.

I realize this is too long of a tweet but Twitter was a weird and special place on the internet, and I’m grateful to have played a teeny tiny role in its story and evolution. I’m here for whatever comes next — on this app and in new places. Consumer social is very much alive and at a fascinating juncture, so I’ll be watching and participating and sharing hot takes because I don’t want to, and probably can’t, turn that part of me off. Perhaps X becomes a resounding success. Or it fails epically. Either way, I expect it will continue to be a very entertaining ride.

totallynotabuttpirate · July 28, 2023

Goredho · July 28, 2023

3 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company. I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside.

Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life. As someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me, Twitter often felt siloed and bureaucratic. Dumb power plays, reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someone’s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly. You couldn’t just be a builder — you also needed to be a politician.

I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was, but there was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls because we were all beholden to the masters of mDAU and revenue growth as a public company. It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build.

Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste. Healthy debate and criticism was replaced by a default refrain of “no, that can’t be done” or “another team owns that so don’t touch it”. Teams could spend months building a feature and then some last-minute kerfuffle meant it’d get killed for being too risky.

Just talking directly to customers could turn into a turf war and create deadlocks between functions. I recall one such episode where a teammate spent a month trying to get clearance to reach out to some creators. He went through 3 layers of management and 6 different functional teams. In the end 4 executives were involved in the approval. It was insanity, and unfortunately I saw several top performers get burnt out and demoralized after exhausting experiences like that.

Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out. A high performance culture pulls everyone up, but the opposite weighs everyone down. Twitter often felt like a place that kept squandering its own potential, which was sad and frustrating to see.

The person who was best at cutting through the BS and inspiring a vision during my tenure was Kayvon Beykpour, but he wasn’t fully empowered to run the company since he wasn’t the CEO. Despite those real issues, I was lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in the business at Twitter in product, design, engineering, research, legal, BD, trust & safety, marketing, PR and more.

Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption. Those teams were very fun to be on but they felt like the exception rather than the rule.

The months of waiting for the deal to close in 2022 were particularly slow and painful; it felt like leadership hid behind lawyers and legal language as all answers about the company’s future notoriously included the phrase “fiduciary duty”. Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems.

Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic – I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company.

My take on what’s happened since then is full of lived nuance. When people ask why I stayed it’s easy to answer: optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money. From the beginning I saw that some changes Elon was going to make were smart and others were stupid, but when I’m on a team I uphold the philosophy of “praise in public and criticize in private”. I was far from a silent wallflower. I shared my opinions openly and pushed back often, both before and after the acquisition.

I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all. I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale. Although I couldn’t change the situation I did my best to shine a light on folks who were doing important work while being an emotionally supportive leader for those who were struggling to adapt to the more brutalist and hardcore culture.

In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over. The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him.

At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said. When individuals encouraged me to be careful about what I said I politely thanked them and said I would not be taking their advice. I had no interest in adding to a culture of fear or walking on eggshells around Elon. Either he would respect me for being real or he could fire me. Either outcome was okay.

I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didn’t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice.

At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it. I don’t think things had to be as difficult or dramatic as they turned out to be but I can’t say I’d bet against Elon or count him out. He’s smart and has enough money to make a lot of mistakes and then course correct when things go awry. As the largest shareholder he can tank the value in the short-term, but eventually he’ll need things to turn around.

His focus on speed is incredible and he’s obviously not afraid of blowing things up, but now the real measure will be how it get reconstructed and if enough people want the new everything app he is building. I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful.

Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence. Social networks are hard to kill but they’re not immune from death spirals.

Only time will tell what the outcome will be but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers. In the meantime, I have a lot of empathy for the employees who are working tirelessly behind the scenes, the advertisers who want a stable platform to sell their stuff on, and the customers who are experiencing chaotic updates. It’s been a madhouse. Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy but now X is run by a mercurial leader whose instinct is driven by the unique and undoubtedly weird experience of being the biggest voice on the platform.

Many of you know me from the sleeping bag incident where I slept on a conference room floor, so I figure, let’s talk about that too. Going viral was an odd and interesting experience. I was attacked by people on the left and called a billionaire bootlicker, while simultaneously being attacked by people on the right for being a working mom who was demonized as an example of a woman choosing her career over her family. Thankfully I can laugh at myself and I don’t take armchair keyboard ideologues too seriously.

Being the main character on the timeline, even for a few minutes, requires a thick skin and a strong sense of self. The real story is pretty simple. I was given a nearly impossible deadline for his first project and as the product lead I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself. So I worked round the clock alongside an amazing team spanning many timezones, and we delivered it on schedule – truly against the odds. It was intense but also fun.

Those first few months were wildly crazy but I wanted to be there and I have no regrets. Showing up and giving it your all should, in most cases, be celebrated. Obviously you can’t work at that pace forever but there are moments where bursts are mission critical. I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic.

I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode. Since I like taking on difficult challenges I found it interesting and rewarding because I was growing and learning so rapidly.

I realize our society today trends toward polarization but when it comes to this app, its owner, and its future, I am neither a fangirl nor a hater — I’m an optimistic pragmatist. This may really irritate the internet but you cannot pigeonhole me into some radical position of either loving or hating every change that’s occurred. I escaped my fundamentalist upbringing and am a free thinker these days.

Everyone can be seen as both a hero or a villain, depending on who is telling what angle of the story. Elon doesn’t deserve to be venerated or vilified. He’s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness.

I disagree with many of his decisions and am surprised by his willingness to burn so much down, but with enough money and time, something new & innovative may emerge. I hope it does.

Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received. Sure the headlines and punchlines wrote themselves but I was battle hardened by then. I knew that I’d worked in a way where I could walk out with my head held high. I have no bitterness about the Product Management team being dismantled, and it made sense for me to exit as nearly all of the remaining PMs were let go. Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed.

I’m a creative and a builder, so sooner than later I’ll jump back into a high intensity company but I’m grateful for this season of thinking, reading, traveling and being with people I love. After having time to reflect I believe more than ever that the very best outcomes flow from great leadership that combines the head and the heart. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes.

It’s a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are also some of the most isolated. I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live. Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. We’ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior. Living in an echo chamber is dangerous and being at the top makes a person even more susceptible to being surrounded by yes people when nearly everyone around you is on the payroll and somehow stands to benefit from being in your orbit.

Figuring out how to keep “better angels” around in the form of family, friends, and teammates is critical to staying on the rails and enduring intense ups and downs. Everyone needs to hear hard truths sometimes and if you fire all the people who speak up then the reality distortion field may just turn into a vortex. I was drawn to Twitter because I’m obsessed with the problem of loneliness and connection between people. I find it fascinating & troubling that humans are getting lonelier as we simultaneously create a world that’s both safer and wealthier. I don’t believe that trade-off has to exist, which is why I keep returning to that theme in my personal and professional life.

I realize this is too long of a tweet but Twitter was a weird and special place on the internet, and I’m grateful to have played a teeny tiny role in its story and evolution. I’m here for whatever comes next — on this app and in new places. Consumer social is very much alive and at a fascinating juncture, so I’ll be watching and participating and sharing hot takes because I don’t want to, and probably can’t, turn that part of me off. Perhaps X becomes a resounding success. Or it fails epically. Either way, I expect it will continue to be a very entertaining ride.

People with epilepsy should not read this post.

BearMace · July 28, 2023

And that is why Twitter was better at 140 characters.

South Austin · July 28, 2023

Still would.

Captain Ron · July 28, 2023

10 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company. I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside.

Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life. As someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me, Twitter often felt siloed and bureaucratic. Dumb power plays, reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someone’s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly. You couldn’t just be a builder — you also needed to be a politician.

I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was, but there was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls because we were all beholden to the masters of mDAU and revenue growth as a public company. It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build.

Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste. Healthy debate and criticism was replaced by a default refrain of “no, that can’t be done” or “another team owns that so don’t touch it”. Teams could spend months building a feature and then some last-minute kerfuffle meant it’d get killed for being too risky.

Just talking directly to customers could turn into a turf war and create deadlocks between functions. I recall one such episode where a teammate spent a month trying to get clearance to reach out to some creators. He went through 3 layers of management and 6 different functional teams. In the end 4 executives were involved in the approval. It was insanity, and unfortunately I saw several top performers get burnt out and demoralized after exhausting experiences like that.

Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out. A high performance culture pulls everyone up, but the opposite weighs everyone down. Twitter often felt like a place that kept squandering its own potential, which was sad and frustrating to see.

The person who was best at cutting through the BS and inspiring a vision during my tenure was Kayvon Beykpour, but he wasn’t fully empowered to run the company since he wasn’t the CEO. Despite those real issues, I was lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in the business at Twitter in product, design, engineering, research, legal, BD, trust & safety, marketing, PR and more.

Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption. Those teams were very fun to be on but they felt like the exception rather than the rule.

The months of waiting for the deal to close in 2022 were particularly slow and painful; it felt like leadership hid behind lawyers and legal language as all answers about the company’s future notoriously included the phrase “fiduciary duty”. Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems.

Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic – I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company.

My take on what’s happened since then is full of lived nuance. When people ask why I stayed it’s easy to answer: optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money. From the beginning I saw that some changes Elon was going to make were smart and others were stupid, but when I’m on a team I uphold the philosophy of “praise in public and criticize in private”. I was far from a silent wallflower. I shared my opinions openly and pushed back often, both before and after the acquisition.

I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all. I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale. Although I couldn’t change the situation I did my best to shine a light on folks who were doing important work while being an emotionally supportive leader for those who were struggling to adapt to the more brutalist and hardcore culture.

In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over. The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him.

At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said. When individuals encouraged me to be careful about what I said I politely thanked them and said I would not be taking their advice. I had no interest in adding to a culture of fear or walking on eggshells around Elon. Either he would respect me for being real or he could fire me. Either outcome was okay.

I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didn’t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice.

At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it. I don’t think things had to be as difficult or dramatic as they turned out to be but I can’t say I’d bet against Elon or count him out. He’s smart and has enough money to make a lot of mistakes and then course correct when things go awry. As the largest shareholder he can tank the value in the short-term, but eventually he’ll need things to turn around.

His focus on speed is incredible and he’s obviously not afraid of blowing things up, but now the real measure will be how it get reconstructed and if enough people want the new everything app he is building. I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful.

Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence. Social networks are hard to kill but they’re not immune from death spirals.

Only time will tell what the outcome will be but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers. In the meantime, I have a lot of empathy for the employees who are working tirelessly behind the scenes, the advertisers who want a stable platform to sell their stuff on, and the customers who are experiencing chaotic updates. It’s been a madhouse. Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy but now X is run by a mercurial leader whose instinct is driven by the unique and undoubtedly weird experience of being the biggest voice on the platform.

Many of you know me from the sleeping bag incident where I slept on a conference room floor, so I figure, let’s talk about that too. Going viral was an odd and interesting experience. I was attacked by people on the left and called a billionaire bootlicker, while simultaneously being attacked by people on the right for being a working mom who was demonized as an example of a woman choosing her career over her family. Thankfully I can laugh at myself and I don’t take armchair keyboard ideologues too seriously.

Being the main character on the timeline, even for a few minutes, requires a thick skin and a strong sense of self. The real story is pretty simple. I was given a nearly impossible deadline for his first project and as the product lead I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself. So I worked round the clock alongside an amazing team spanning many timezones, and we delivered it on schedule – truly against the odds. It was intense but also fun.

Those first few months were wildly crazy but I wanted to be there and I have no regrets. Showing up and giving it your all should, in most cases, be celebrated. Obviously you can’t work at that pace forever but there are moments where bursts are mission critical. I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic.

I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode. Since I like taking on difficult challenges I found it interesting and rewarding because I was growing and learning so rapidly.

I realize our society today trends toward polarization but when it comes to this app, its owner, and its future, I am neither a fangirl nor a hater — I’m an optimistic pragmatist. This may really irritate the internet but you cannot pigeonhole me into some radical position of either loving or hating every change that’s occurred. I escaped my fundamentalist upbringing and am a free thinker these days.

Everyone can be seen as both a hero or a villain, depending on who is telling what angle of the story. Elon doesn’t deserve to be venerated or vilified. He’s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness.

I disagree with many of his decisions and am surprised by his willingness to burn so much down, but with enough money and time, something new & innovative may emerge. I hope it does.

Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received. Sure the headlines and punchlines wrote themselves but I was battle hardened by then. I knew that I’d worked in a way where I could walk out with my head held high. I have no bitterness about the Product Management team being dismantled, and it made sense for me to exit as nearly all of the remaining PMs were let go. Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed.

I’m a creative and a builder, so sooner than later I’ll jump back into a high intensity company but I’m grateful for this season of thinking, reading, traveling and being with people I love. After having time to reflect I believe more than ever that the very best outcomes flow from great leadership that combines the head and the heart. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes.

It’s a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are also some of the most isolated. I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live. Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. We’ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior. Living in an echo chamber is dangerous and being at the top makes a person even more susceptible to being surrounded by yes people when nearly everyone around you is on the payroll and somehow stands to benefit from being in your orbit.

Figuring out how to keep “better angels” around in the form of family, friends, and teammates is critical to staying on the rails and enduring intense ups and downs. Everyone needs to hear hard truths sometimes and if you fire all the people who speak up then the reality distortion field may just turn into a vortex. I was drawn to Twitter because I’m obsessed with the problem of loneliness and connection between people. I find it fascinating & troubling that humans are getting lonelier as we simultaneously create a world that’s both safer and wealthier. I don’t believe that trade-off has to exist, which is why I keep returning to that theme in my personal and professional life.

I realize this is too long of a tweet but Twitter was a weird and special place on the internet, and I’m grateful to have played a teeny tiny role in its story and evolution. I’m here for whatever comes next — on this app and in new places. Consumer social is very much alive and at a fascinating juncture, so I’ll be watching and participating and sharing hot takes because I don’t want to, and probably can’t, turn that part of me off. Perhaps X becomes a resounding success. Or it fails epically. Either way, I expect it will continue to be a very entertaining ride.

Neonmoon · July 28, 2023

11 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

even ask his biographer for product advice.

This is sad

Captain Ron · July 28, 2023

11 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company. I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside.

Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life. As someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me, Twitter often felt siloed and bureaucratic. Dumb power plays, reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someone’s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly. You couldn’t just be a builder — you also needed to be a politician.

I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was, but there was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls because we were all beholden to the masters of mDAU and revenue growth as a public company. It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build.

Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste. Healthy debate and criticism was replaced by a default refrain of “no, that can’t be done” or “another team owns that so don’t touch it”. Teams could spend months building a feature and then some last-minute kerfuffle meant it’d get killed for being too risky.

Just talking directly to customers could turn into a turf war and create deadlocks between functions. I recall one such episode where a teammate spent a month trying to get clearance to reach out to some creators. He went through 3 layers of management and 6 different functional teams. In the end 4 executives were involved in the approval. It was insanity, and unfortunately I saw several top performers get burnt out and demoralized after exhausting experiences like that.

Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out. A high performance culture pulls everyone up, but the opposite weighs everyone down. Twitter often felt like a place that kept squandering its own potential, which was sad and frustrating to see.

The person who was best at cutting through the BS and inspiring a vision during my tenure was Kayvon Beykpour, but he wasn’t fully empowered to run the company since he wasn’t the CEO. Despite those real issues, I was lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in the business at Twitter in product, design, engineering, research, legal, BD, trust & safety, marketing, PR and more.

Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption. Those teams were very fun to be on but they felt like the exception rather than the rule.

The months of waiting for the deal to close in 2022 were particularly slow and painful; it felt like leadership hid behind lawyers and legal language as all answers about the company’s future notoriously included the phrase “fiduciary duty”. Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems.

Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic – I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company.

My take on what’s happened since then is full of lived nuance. When people ask why I stayed it’s easy to answer: optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money. From the beginning I saw that some changes Elon was going to make were smart and others were stupid, but when I’m on a team I uphold the philosophy of “praise in public and criticize in private”. I was far from a silent wallflower. I shared my opinions openly and pushed back often, both before and after the acquisition.

I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all. I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale. Although I couldn’t change the situation I did my best to shine a light on folks who were doing important work while being an emotionally supportive leader for those who were struggling to adapt to the more brutalist and hardcore culture.

In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over. The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him.

At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said. When individuals encouraged me to be careful about what I said I politely thanked them and said I would not be taking their advice. I had no interest in adding to a culture of fear or walking on eggshells around Elon. Either he would respect me for being real or he could fire me. Either outcome was okay.

I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didn’t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice.

At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it. I don’t think things had to be as difficult or dramatic as they turned out to be but I can’t say I’d bet against Elon or count him out. He’s smart and has enough money to make a lot of mistakes and then course correct when things go awry. As the largest shareholder he can tank the value in the short-term, but eventually he’ll need things to turn around.

His focus on speed is incredible and he’s obviously not afraid of blowing things up, but now the real measure will be how it get reconstructed and if enough people want the new everything app he is building. I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful.

Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence. Social networks are hard to kill but they’re not immune from death spirals.

Only time will tell what the outcome will be but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers. In the meantime, I have a lot of empathy for the employees who are working tirelessly behind the scenes, the advertisers who want a stable platform to sell their stuff on, and the customers who are experiencing chaotic updates. It’s been a madhouse. Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy but now X is run by a mercurial leader whose instinct is driven by the unique and undoubtedly weird experience of being the biggest voice on the platform.

Many of you know me from the sleeping bag incident where I slept on a conference room floor, so I figure, let’s talk about that too. Going viral was an odd and interesting experience. I was attacked by people on the left and called a billionaire bootlicker, while simultaneously being attacked by people on the right for being a working mom who was demonized as an example of a woman choosing her career over her family. Thankfully I can laugh at myself and I don’t take armchair keyboard ideologues too seriously.

Being the main character on the timeline, even for a few minutes, requires a thick skin and a strong sense of self. The real story is pretty simple. I was given a nearly impossible deadline for his first project and as the product lead I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself. So I worked round the clock alongside an amazing team spanning many timezones, and we delivered it on schedule – truly against the odds. It was intense but also fun.

Those first few months were wildly crazy but I wanted to be there and I have no regrets. Showing up and giving it your all should, in most cases, be celebrated. Obviously you can’t work at that pace forever but there are moments where bursts are mission critical. I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic.

I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode. Since I like taking on difficult challenges I found it interesting and rewarding because I was growing and learning so rapidly.

I realize our society today trends toward polarization but when it comes to this app, its owner, and its future, I am neither a fangirl nor a hater — I’m an optimistic pragmatist. This may really irritate the internet but you cannot pigeonhole me into some radical position of either loving or hating every change that’s occurred. I escaped my fundamentalist upbringing and am a free thinker these days.

Everyone can be seen as both a hero or a villain, depending on who is telling what angle of the story. Elon doesn’t deserve to be venerated or vilified. He’s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness.

I disagree with many of his decisions and am surprised by his willingness to burn so much down, but with enough money and time, something new & innovative may emerge. I hope it does.

Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received. Sure the headlines and punchlines wrote themselves but I was battle hardened by then. I knew that I’d worked in a way where I could walk out with my head held high. I have no bitterness about the Product Management team being dismantled, and it made sense for me to exit as nearly all of the remaining PMs were let go. Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed.

I’m a creative and a builder, so sooner than later I’ll jump back into a high intensity company but I’m grateful for this season of thinking, reading, traveling and being with people I love. After having time to reflect I believe more than ever that the very best outcomes flow from great leadership that combines the head and the heart. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes.

It’s a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are also some of the most isolated. I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live. Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. We’ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior. Living in an echo chamber is dangerous and being at the top makes a person even more susceptible to being surrounded by yes people when nearly everyone around you is on the payroll and somehow stands to benefit from being in your orbit.

Figuring out how to keep “better angels” around in the form of family, friends, and teammates is critical to staying on the rails and enduring intense ups and downs. Everyone needs to hear hard truths sometimes and if you fire all the people who speak up then the reality distortion field may just turn into a vortex. I was drawn to Twitter because I’m obsessed with the problem of loneliness and connection between people. I find it fascinating & troubling that humans are getting lonelier as we simultaneously create a world that’s both safer and wealthier. I don’t believe that trade-off has to exist, which is why I keep returning to that theme in my personal and professional life.

I realize this is too long of a tweet but Twitter was a weird and special place on the internet, and I’m grateful to have played a teeny tiny role in its story and evolution. I’m here for whatever comes next — on this app and in new places. Consumer social is very much alive and at a fascinating juncture, so I’ll be watching and participating and sharing hot takes because I don’t want to, and probably can’t, turn that part of me off. Perhaps X becomes a resounding success. Or it fails epically. Either way, I expect it will continue to be a very entertaining ride.

This also shows how shitty this tech is.

A. Twitter isn’t meant for long form posts. Trying to read that is a slog especially on twitters mobile first interface. This post really highlights how bad that is.

B. God that video player sucks. I started to watch the video and realized it was too slow, no controls for faster speed. I would listen at 2x if I could. About halfway through I had to do something, paused and came back, the player was frozen. I was frustrated with speed, so I shifted to reading it.

That’s just 2 complaints but really highlight problems. You want it to be “everything” Elon? Shouldn’t you do something well first?

Hefeweizen · July 28, 2023

So the lady who slept on the floor wrote a novel? Good for her. Ain’t nobody got time to read that long cat.

atomheartbevo · July 28, 2023

54 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

This is sad

That whole passage reads like he’s a moron and he’s paranoid. Like the kind of paranoia where you think everybody around you is out to get you, so rather than trust the experts at Twitter that you think are out to make you look bad, you trust people, such as your Tesla bros, or your biographer, or random Twitter users because you think that surely they aren’t out to make you look bad. He has such paranoia because he’s out to get/fire a lot of people, so he’s projecting.

I think she figured it out and doesn’t remain puzzled, but didn’t want to say so out of retaliation fears.

Quote

I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didn’t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice.

At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it.

NoName · July 28, 2023

16 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

https://daringfireball.net/2023/07/translation_yaccarino_x

Translation From Hostage Code to English of X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino’s Company-Wide Memo

Hide contents

Hi team,

What a momentous weekend.

Everyone said to me, “Linda, what are you thinking? You don’t want to work for that guy. He’s crazy and impulsive. You’ve got a great job at NBC. You’ve got a great future ahead of you. If you take this job it’ll tank your career and your name will be a punchline.” Did I listen to them?

As I said yesterday, it’s extremely rare, whether it’s in life or in business, that you have the opportunity to make another big impression. That’s what we’re experiencing together, in real time. Take a moment to put it all into perspective.

It’s OK to day-drink. I am.

17 years ago, Twitter made a lasting imprint on the world. The platform changed the speed at which people accessed information. It created a new dynamic for how people communicated, debated, and responded to things happening in the world. Twitter introduced a new way for people, public figures, and brands to build long lasting relationships. In one way or another, everyone here is a driving force in that change. But equally all our users and partners constantly challenged us to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfill our great potential.

Twitter was a simple concept with profound impact.

With X we will go even further to transform the global town square — and impress the world all over again.

It’s not just you. I have no idea what’s going on either.

Our company uniquely has the drive to make this possible.

Fucking Elon.

Many companies say they want to move fast — but we enjoy moving at the speed of light, and when we do, that’s X.

According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, as an object approaches the speed of light, the object’s mass becomes infinite and so too does the energy required to move it. But this holds true, in degree, for all objects in motion, and a mind-bending aspect of special relativity is that the faster an object is moving, the more slowly it experiences time. If you were able to move at the speed of light, time wouldn’t pass at all. It would be like being damned for eternity, forever caught in the current moment, while the world moves on for everyone else.

I think about this.

At our core, we have an inventor mindset — constantly learning, testing out new approaches, changing to get it right and ultimately succeeding.

We are hemorrhaging cash and our advertisers are still fleeing.

With X, we serve our entire community of users and customers by working tirelessly to preserve free expression and choice, create limitless interactivity, and create a marketplace that enables the economic success of all its participants.

I used to run all advertising for NBCUniversal. Now I’m running an $8/month multi-level marketing scheme where the only users who’ve signed up are men who own a collection of MAGA hats.

The best news is we’re well underway.

There is no hope.

Everyone should be proud of the pace of innovation over the last nine months — from long form content, to creator monetization, and tremendous advancements in brand safety protections.

Have you seen the ads we’re running these days? Last week we were filling everyone’s timeline with ads for discount boner pill chewing gum, the punchline of which ads is that you’ll bang your lady so hard she’ll need the aid of a walker afterward. That’s a video we promoted to everyone. This week it’s anime for foot fetishists. That’s what we put in everyone’s feed, every three tweets. Or X’s, or whatever we’re now calling them. I used to book hundred-million-dollar Olympic sponsorship deals with companies like Coca-Cola and Proctor & Gamble. (Thank god for Apple.)

Our usage is at an all time high

Our owner is high as a kite.

and we’ll continue to delight our entire community with new experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.

Our focus group testing suggests that while interest in trusting this platform — which, let’s face it, is not exactly known for its reliability — for banking, of all things, is, as you’d expect, pretty low overall, it’s surprisingly high amongst people who know who Catturd is.

Please don’t take this moment for granted.

Please quit. Get out. I beg you. Leave while you can put on your resume that you worked for “Twitter”.

You’re writing history, and there’s no limit to our transformation.

As if this rebranding disaster isn’t enough, our infrastructure is crumbling. Facebook took Threads from 0 to 100 million users in under a week, without a hitch, at the same time we imposed comical rate limits on usage. I mean can you even believe that shit? I still can’t. I said to him, “Elon, we are an ad-based business. Our revenue is directly commensurate to usage. This is like running a casino and turning the slot machines off to save on the electricity bill. It makes no sense.” And Elon was like “Bots!”

And everyone, is invited to build X with us.

I think I, saw on a TV show once that a hostage was able, to signal to authorities the need for help without alerting, their captors by placing commas randomly in their sentences.

Elon and I will be working across every team and partner to bring X to the world. That includes keeping our entire community up to date, ensuring that we all have the information we need to move forward.

I found out about this name change when you did, at midnight on Saturday, and I have no idea what that fucker is going to do next or when he’s going to do it. You know this. You know that I know that you know this. But I’m going to persist with the charade that these decisions are being made by a team that I’m a leader of, because to do otherwise would be even more humiliating.

Now, let’s go make that next big impression on the world, together.

Linda

I’m so sorry.

Linda

really kind of shocked at how much Gruber is going way out of his way multiple times a week to shit on Elon and Twitter. now granted, Elon makes it super easy but Gruber is going pretty hard in the paint on them.

Captain Ron · July 28, 2023

3 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

That whole passage reads like he’s a moron and he’s paranoid. Like the kind of paranoia where you think everybody around you is out to get you, so rather than trust the experts at Twitter that you think are out to make you look bad, you trust people, such as your Tesla bros, or your biographer, or random Twitter users because you think that surely they aren’t out to make you look bad. He has such paranoia because he’s out to get/fire a lot of people, so he’s projecting.

I think she figured it out and doesn’t remain puzzled, but didn’t want to say so out of retaliation fears.

That's pretty much outlined in the end of the article where she talks about how as you climb higher, your world is smaller. You are only surrounded by Yes men because their economic well-being is tied to them being in your orbit. And how it turns your reality distortion field into a full up vortex.

It's actually a fascinating read from someone that was up that close.

NoName · July 28, 2023

4 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

That whole passage reads like he’s a moron and he’s paranoid. Like the kind of paranoia where you think everybody around you is out to get you, so rather than trust the experts at Twitter that you think are out to make you look bad, you trust people, such as your Tesla bros, or your biographer, or random Twitter users because you think that surely they aren’t out to make you look bad. He has such paranoia because he’s out to get/fire a lot of people, so he’s projecting.

I think she figured it out and doesn’t remain puzzled, but didn’t want to say so out of retaliation fears.

i mean the guy has a full security team at all times, even inside the buildings he owns (which says all you need to know about the security of said buildings)

the guy absolutely is paranoid.

then again...

atomheartbevo · July 28, 2023

11 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

That's pretty much outlined in the end of the article where she talks about how as you climb higher, your world is smaller. You are only surrounded by Yes men because their economic well-being is tied to them being in your orbit. And how it turns your reality distortion field into a full up vortex.

It's actually a fascinating read from someone that was up that close.

Yeah, and the fact that so many people, even at higher levels, were afraid to tell him the truth is pretty telling, and explains a lot of the problems Twitter has. That kind of management style means you don’t find out about potential problems until they actually become problems.

It was also interesting that she called out his lack of empathy and not understanding how social media networks actually works, which I think we all knew, but she was pretty close to him and in charge of Twitter Blue. He sees it as a place to give his thoughts to the masses, and to shit-post and trash people he doesn’t like, and that since he paid for it, the end-users should pay him. He has no clue that so many people were relying on it to spread information, stay in touch, etc. which is probably why he can’t believe so many people bailed for other platforms.

I thought I spoilered it, so apologies to everybody, but I figured he would delete it, citing some NDA or whatever.

atomheartbevo · July 28, 2023

14 minutes ago, NoName said:

i mean the guy has a full security team at all times, even inside the buildings he owns (which says all you need to know about the security of said buildings)

the guy absolutely is paranoid.

He probably has no clue that his actions are why so many hate him. I honestly couldn’t imagine working for somebody like that, and not just having to keep the truth from him so he doesn’t get upset, but that would be a big part of it. Most people I’ve worked for, they’d be pissed off if I lied to them out of fear of them getting pissed off. Then again, they also have bosses or financial responsibilities, so if they get lied to, they are passing it on whether they realize it or not, so when the lie is exposed they are on the hook. That doesn’t happen with Elon since he’s the top of the food chain and doesn’t have normal financial responsibilities, so everybody tries to keep him in the dark about bad things.

Hell, I’m betting he thought he could switch Twitter to X.com as quickly as he asked for submissions for an X logo.

NoName · July 28, 2023

if you want to see example #infinity where they can't even replace names with this "rebrand"

here is the full name for tabs right now on the desktop...which still includes twitter at the front of it. they couldn't edit it so they just added "/ X" at the end lol

Serak The Preparer · July 28, 2023

12 minutes ago, NoName said:

if you want to see example #infinity where they can't even replace names with this "rebrand"

here is the full name for tabs right now on the desktop...which still includes twitter at the front of it. they couldn't edit it so they just added "/ X" at the end lol

Man, Waddle is going to be great when he enters the portal and becomes a Longhorn.

NoName · July 28, 2023

Chopper · July 28, 2023

I'm surprised this hasn't picked up traction.

Quote

An ad launched by Progress Action Fund launched, showing an elderly Republican congressman interrupting a couple in the bedroom, has now been banned on X, formerly known as Twitter. According to the Progress Action Fund, which aims to defeat Republicans in red states, the platform “has censored” its account as well as the ad, called “Keep Republicans Out Of Your Bedroom.” In addition, the platform has “placed a ‘Search Ban’ and a ‘Search Suggestion Ban’ on the account.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, the account did not show up on the social media platform, yet the ad could still be seen on X through retweets from other accounts.

Quote

The ad features a scene in which a woman asks a man if he has a condom. He reaches for the condom in a bedside table drawer, and another suit-covered arm appears, reaching for it as well. “Sorry, you can’t use those,” says an older man, clad in a black suit and red tie, while standing beside the bed. When the woman asks who he is, he replies: “I’m your Republican congressman. Now that we’re in charge, we’re banning birth control.”

The ad urges voters to “vote no” on 8 August, in reference to State Issue 1, which would require proposed amendments to Ohio’s constitution “receive the approval of at least 60 per cent of eligible voters voting on the proposed amendment,” rather than a simple majority.

article on yahoo news

Celery Man · July 28, 2023

22 minutes ago, Chopper said:

I'm surprised this hasn't picked up traction.

article on yahoo news

Edited July 28, 2023 by Celery Man

atomheartbevo · July 28, 2023

After a bunch of people bitched, including people who would not be able to use twitter if he ditched the light mode, he relented. He still had to throw a hissy fit and get rid of dim, which a lot of people also wanted.

Goes to show how much of a dumbass he's being - this functionality already exists and costs nothing to maintain, but the 12 year-old incel edgelord has to dictate how everybody uses his platform. And it was also continuing his trend of removing functionality from twitter.

atomheartbevo · July 28, 2023

https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/police-investigating-false-alarm-of-active-shooter-at-tesla-gigafactory/

Quote

Authorities responded to the Tesla gigafactory early Friday morning after receiving “shots fired” and “active shooter” reports from the area. Travis County Sheriff’s Office deputies got a 911 call of an active shooter around 4:17 a.m., according to TCSO.

TCSO said deputies cleared the building and “found nothing out of the ordinary; no casualties, no sounds of gunfire, nothing to substantiate the presence of a shooter at all.” TCSO said its investigation found no malicious intent behind the call and no criminal element involved in the incident.

Quote

An off-duty Tesla employee told KXAN they got a text just before 5 a.m. that those on site should take cover due to an “active attacker.”

Austin Fire Department’s shift commander on duty at the time told KXAN that Tesla’s security made the response tougher for first responders because “Tesla security blocked the intersection and it backed up traffic. Seems it was shift change and traffic was heavy,” AFD said.

Captain Ron · July 28, 2023

4 hours ago, Chopper said:

I'm surprised this hasn't picked up traction.

article on yahoo news

Ad found on twitter, I had to search through google to get to their page, because they are right, you can't search for them on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/progress__af/status/1680735582383931392

And yeah, because it's THAT account, you can't embed it, so here is their YT video (which does get them ad revenue)

Chopper · July 28, 2023

Cory Doctorow published a thing today.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/

Quote

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a "utopian socialist." He lies about being a "free speech absolutist." He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2

He lies about being the "chief engineer" of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don't care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible – as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn't a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named "Ole Bub":

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had "reality distortion fields," but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn't doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There's an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk's public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he's much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he's been promising "full self driving…next year."

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He's hasn't delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn't its cars, it's Tesla's business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla's balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla's got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla's ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla's batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don't own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That's just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don't own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla's shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car's software without Tesla's permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there's no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device's software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn't have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users' privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can't attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you'd immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you'd figure something was up pretty quick – like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren't getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there's a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can't go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there's nothing wrong with the car. It's performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren't broken.

This new unit – the "diversion team" – was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn't defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs's "You're holding it wrong"):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren't just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car's range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they'd have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers' cars: a source told Reuters that "Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car" without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries' regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively – think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn't merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being – but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren't just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed – they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

(Image: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, modified)

atomheartbevo · July 28, 2023

8 minutes ago, Chopper said:

That's just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don't own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla's shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

8 minutes ago, Chopper said:

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car's software without Tesla's permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

His fanbois will continue backing him no matter how many times he shits on them.

Francisco 2.0 · July 29, 2023

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/28/23811987/twitters-slipshod-rebranding-project-runs-into-apples-app-store-rules

Quote

Twitter’s slipshod rebranding project runs into Apple’s App Store rules.

The app formerly known as Twitter is still listed as Twitter in the App Store, which, as pointed out by a few people, is likely due to Apple’s rules, which appear to bar anyone from shortening the marketing name in the App Store to a single character.

However, you can make the Home Screen name of an app a single character, which is how it now appears, along with the new icon.

NoName · July 29, 2023

Oh my God. The sign

So bad.

Francisco 2.0 · July 29, 2023

3 minutes ago, NoName said:

Oh my God. The sign

So bad.

Good God. I'm guessing there's no permit for this, either, and one probably wouldn't have been granted given the incredibly poor taste and design of said logo.

I'm sure the landlord is proud.

atomheartbevo · July 29, 2023

16 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Good God. I'm guessing there's no permit for this, either, and one probably wouldn't have been granted given the incredibly poor taste and design of said logo.

I'm sure the landlord is proud.

Given they didn't have permission from the landlord last time they fucked with the sign (and before when he had the "W" removed so it said "Titter"), I'm guessing he's trying to get kicked out (don't have to pay rent!)

Also, it seems like every day these past two weeks, has been another example of him not understanding how to manage a business. Trademarks, not understanding how branding works, then trying to make a rebranding happen in the worst way possible.

RDCanecutter · July 29, 2023

34 minutes ago, NoName said:

Oh my God. The sign

So bad.

Yo, Erector Sets are retro.

Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand · July 29, 2023

Cougar High Temporary Bleachers just tweeted "Good job!"

The Dog · July 29, 2023

cactusflinthead · July 29, 2023

atomheartbevo · July 29, 2023

Meanwhile, he's retweeting this, even as he has said he wants X to be a literal shopping/banking/financial transactions platform

atomheartbevo · July 29, 2023

Ted Lange · July 29, 2023

And crispy and the other fan bois nod along in acceptance, cucks.

Edited July 29, 2023 by Ted Lange

Francisco 2.0 · July 29, 2023

Captain Ron · July 29, 2023

LOL that most of the Twitter sign is still up. “But they really did have a permit!!”

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Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

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