I completely agree. The idea that he’s a software genius, or even that he has a passing understanding of how software works or is written, is a myth. Some of the things he’s said show that he has no idea at all what he’s talking about.
I’ve seen no evidence at all that he’s a genius in any other field, but plenty that he’s foolish and narcissistic, to say the least.
I do indeed enjoy these commentries from the “Twitter will collapse in a heap now that Musk is running it” crowd and the “must denigrate anyone non-woke” crowd!
Hilton wants to stay away from his rockets and cars does he? So who might know about rockets? Maybe NASA, who contract most of their launches to SpaceX these days. Then there’s the long queue of commerical customers for SpaceX launches. They produce more launches, more reliably and much cheaper, than anyone else. Who else has developed rockets that land themselves and can be reused?
As for cars, well Tesla cars regularly top polls for user satisfaction. Maybe people who drive the cars know more about this than Hilton?
On other comments on Musk by Hilton:
Lots and lots of rich people inherit wealth and use it to make “big-bet” investments …
Musk and his brother each got $14,000 from their dad to found their first company. Hardly major wealth.
Four years later they sold that company for $300 million. Musk re-invested his share into a new company that became PayPal. Three years later it was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. (Musk’s share was $175 million, quite an increase on $14,000 in 7 years. This is not “inherited wealth”.)
That was then re-invested in Tesla and SpaceX and other things …
Rich people can afford to do that because if these bets fail, they’ll be fine. It’s easy to hit in roulette when you get to play multiple times, …
So if Hilton thinks this is just playing roulette, maybe he could give us a list of all of Musk’s failed companies …
The “decamped to Mastadon” crowd are just mighty pissed that woke people like them no longer get to be in charge of “curating” what can be said on Twitter.
The idea that he’s a software genius, or even that he has a passing understanding of how software works or is written, is a myth.
I suspect that Musk does little hands-on coding these days, but his first company was an internet/website company that he founded with his brother. At the start there were only 3 people in it. Musk was the one who did most of the coding, working at it all hours of the day.
The fact that, 4 years later, they sold the company to Compaq Computer for $300 million rather suggests that Elon was not a complete numpty at software.
All this Musk-hating is rather at odds with reality.
[ And when he was aged 12 he wrote a computer game and sold it to a magazine for $500. Not bad, in terms of both coding and entrepreneurship, for a 12-yr-old. ]
If you can identify anyone on this site who denigrates people for being “non-woke”, I wish you would give examples. This site spends at least as much time being skeptical of being woke as being skeptical of “non-woke”.
i see little to suggest Musk is a genius, but I am no specialist in his fields. I do see evidence that he will not listen to people who are more knowledgeable than he is, and if that is the case, than no matter how smart he is, he isn’t smart. That’s Trump.
As for who is buying his stuff, that may be as much about marketing as anything else. That is one place I do think Musk is either genius or hires geniuses, because he has been a top-class marketer of his main product – him. As for NASA, remember they are the ones that bought the faulty O-ring. I don’t take their purchase choices as indication of anything but lowest bidder.
Government purchases are, in fact, often not an indication of highest quality, since they are required to go lowest bidder. Which is why I have spent a number of years of my life working on equipment that is not quite up to the standard needed to meet the standard of quality required of employees. Somehow we meet that standard, though our equipment is substandard. So don’t tell me that NASA or people lining up for his launches is proof of anything; I’ll wait and see what happens in a few years.
True modern polymaths are probably as rare as Bigfoot, but there are people with specialized genius that allows them to have great success. Often, however, such people mistakenly believe success in one arena translates to all others. I see this all the time in my area of work – even giant corporations with enormous resources from other endeavors often break their pick on my industry because they assume success in one business gives them an edge in all others.
If you can identify anyone on this site who denigrates people for being “non-woke”, …
The comment was aimed at Rod Hilton, quoted in the OP, and similar people. But I am pretty convinced that a lot of the hostility to Musk and his takeover of Twitter is because he is anti-woke (and because he is successful and a billionaire, neither of which endears him to today’s US left). Again, I’m talking in general, not specifically about people here.
I do see evidence that [Musk] will not listen to people who are more knowledgeable than he is, …
People say all sorts of things about him, another one is that his companies are only successful because he hires a lot of very good people and lets them get on with it (this one has a lot of truth in it). Does he really not listen to more-knowledgable people? Well, again, judge him on his track record.
So don’t tell me that NASA or people lining up for his launches is proof of anything; I’ll wait and see what happens in a few years.
NASA and commerical companies also care about reliability, since, even if they insure their satellite, a failure still costs them several years “opportunity cost”.
And we already are several years downstream. This from wiki:
“Falcon 9 Full Thrust began launch operations in December 2015. As of 12 February 2023, Falcon 9 Full Thrust had performed 183 launches without any failures. … this rocket is the most reliable orbital launch vehicle currently in operation”.
SpaceX are currently making many more launches than anyone else, while also having the best reliability record, and while also being the lowest bidder.
And yet, if you listen to Rod Hilton, you should “stay the hell away” from them.
As for who is buying his stuff, that may be as much about marketing as anything else.
Tesla don’t advertise and don’t really have a marketing department. They’ve never had to, they’ve always had a waiting list of people wanting to buy Teslas as fast as they can produce them. A good product sells itself, and they have (so far) had the best electric cars.
That is one place I do think Musk is either genius or hires geniuses, because he has been a top-class marketer of his main product – him.
You think so? I’d say that is one area where it is easy to fault him.
Coel, Tesla may not advertise, but it is marketed. If it weren’t, I would not have heard of it. Sending out press releases that are picked up by major news organizations is a form of advertising. Even if he doesn’t do that, somehow he is getting the name of his product out there.
It would not be such a large company if it were not finding a way to get the product in front of people. Advertising can be extremely subtle, and marketing is more than advertising.
You think so? I’d say that is one area where it is easy to fault him.
Really? Then why do so many people know who he is? Good publicity, bad publicity – as P. T. Barnum said, there is no such thing as bad publicity. I maintain that he is an extremely successful marketer; if everyone knows your name, and your product, then in fact, you have not failed at marketing.
OK, re-phrase, Tesla hasn’t done paid advertising. The message gets out there because the media are happy to talk about Tesla cars a lot without being paid to do so.
OK, re-phrase, Tesla hasn’t done paid advertising. The message gets out there because the media are happy to talk about Tesla cars a lot without being paid to do so.
Sort of like the 2016 Trump campaign. Hillary gets a lot of flack for outspending him by a large margin, but the media wasn’t as eager to put her on the front page, and every other page of the paper, every day of the campaign. He didn’t need to spend to advertise, but he was a major self-promoter and got his name out there.
Musk does the same thing. Intentionally? I would think so.
He (hired the people who) greatly cut the cost of putting stuff in orbit, by learning how to make 1st stages of rockets reusable. SpaceX might get the whole thing reusable soon.
Being very good at one thing doesn’t necessarily make one good at other things.
‘Twitter, under the control of DeSantis-supporter Elon Musk, is attempting to undermine Popular Information’s reporting. The platform appended a “Community Note” to our viral thread about Florida classroom libraries, indicating that our tweets were “misleading.”
‘The note appended by Twitter was false. The Manatee County School District explicitly instructed its teachers to “[r]emove or cover all classroom libraries” or risk criminal charges. I obtained the document distributed to principals and teachers, which you can read HERE.’
‘This is a problem: Over the last four years, half of Popular Information’s readers found out about this newsletter on Twitter. Now, we can no longer count on Twitter to sustain our growth.’
And here is the opening paragraph from an article by Margaret Atwood in The Atlantic:
‘It’s shunning time in Madison County, Virginia, where the school board recently banished my novel The Handmaid’s Tale from the shelves of the high-school library. I have been rendered “unacceptable.” Governor Glenn Youngkin enabled such censorship last year when he signed legislation allowing parents to veto teaching materials they perceive as sexually explicit.’
“Community Notes” are Twitter’s new method for dealing with false information. They’re not put there by Twitter, they are put there by other users. Then, users can flag them as “useful” or not. In other words, it is a crowd-sourced response to possibly false or misleading Tweets.
The advantage of this is that the process is out in the open. If you think a “Community Note” is wrong (and the original Tweet correct), then you can add a reply saying that. Just as users need to evaluate Tweets, they need to evaluate Community Notes.
This is better than deletion or shadow-banning or outright banning that is both hidden and done by unaccountable moderators.
No system for dealing with false information will be perfect, but this system strikes me as worth a try.
And, obviously, a new method for dealing with true information that someone dislikes, and one which may well lead to a pile-on by that someone’s dishonourable ideological pals.
What strikes me most about Coel’s evasions and his carefully practiced admissions, or non-admissions, that he was wrong (as in his response to iknklast, which is couched in such a way as to suggest that he considers the matter at issue to be trivial and beneath him) is the oh-so-reasonable tone — except when he gets on to the ‘“must denigrate anyone non-woke” crowd’, amongst whom he appears to include anyone who disagrees with his ideological position. Does he not see the hypocrisy in his incessant trotting out of horrid examples of ‘wokeness’ even as he ignores the many examples of attempts at censorship, and actual censorship, by people who espouse his own views, of books by writers like Toni Morison and Margaret Atwood, or, say, Bari Weiss’s attempts to smear Arab academics who criticised the policies of the Israeli government and to ruin their careers, and her subsequent lies about her behaviour?
So Tim, why do you consider it worthwhile to make a whole comment that is pretty much just a personal attack? That’s what’s wrong with discourse today. Aren’t the actual issues more important?
As for Twitter’s “community notes”, if you’re interested you can look into the ways in which they’re trying to ensure they don’t become ideological. Whether that works, well, we’ll have to see. I don’t think there is an idea method of dealing with false information.
What strikes me most about Coel’s evasions …
What evasions?
(as in his response to iknklast, which is couched in such a way as to suggest that he considers the matter at issue to be trivial and beneath him) …
Well you’re right there, I suggest that most people would already have interpreted my original comment as being about paid advertising. And suggesting that the success of Tesla cars and SpaceX rockets is mostly about “marketing” is rather silly.
… is the oh-so-reasonable tone …
I apologise for not being histrionic and tribal. Histrionic and tribal responses are sadly lacking on the internet these days.
Does he not see the hypocrisy in his incessant trotting out of horrid examples of ‘wokeness’ even as he ignores the many examples of attempts at censorship, and actual censorship, by people who espouse his own views, …
No-one who espouses my views supports such censorship. I’m a pretty anti-censorship sort of guy.
And one thing I learned from the marketing seminars I was required to attend is that the most effective marketing is what doesn’t look like marketing.
Of course they are successful because of marketing; just not what a lot of people think of as marketing. It isn’t commercials on your favorite sit com or the Superbowl; it’s carefully cultivated media presence. A disturbing number of things in newscasts these days are things a corporation made and sent to the news; the news rarely reports that, of course, but they use them because it saves them money.
You don’t get your name out there by not telling anyone who you are. The press is not likely to notice you unless they have a reason. However subtle marketing may be, it is still marketing.
Hi iknklast, just for starters, you can’t develop the world’s first reusable rocket, and have them be the world’s most reliable launch vehicle just by clever marketing, you need good engineering.
And coming top in customer-satisfaction surveys is quite hard if you’re using good marketing to sell duff cars. (Especially if all the other car makers worldwide, starting with far bigger resources, are trying their best at marketing and car making also.)
So, no, the track record of Musk’s companies is not primarily about marketing. Primarily it’s about engineering.
I write much better novels than many of the ones getting published, but I am lousy at marketing. It isn’t JUST the quality of the product (there are a lot of shit-quality products that are selling quite well, regardless of what economic theory says), but clever marketing that encourages people to try them out. It doesn’t matter how great your product is; there has to be marketing. No one walked into Tesla and bought a car because it was well-made; they walked into Tesla and bought a car because they heard of it, and heard it was well-made.
This truth is obscure, apparently. Noting that marketing is what is selling his cars is not suggesting they are crap cars; I don’t know, I haven’t driven one and don’t wish to. I refuse to plug an electric car into coal powered electricity, and right now, that is my option. But the best made product in the world gets nowhere if no one knows it exists. And it isn’t going along on its own getting everyone to buy it without some form of marketing.
I have decided not to engage anymore with someone who not only chooses to interpret what I am saying incorrectly, but also calls me silly.
The most popular burger in the United States is McDonald’s. One of the crappiest hamburgers ever conceived is McDonald’s.
Being the most popular does not mean being the best. Again, maybe Tesla is; I’ve heard otherwise from people who have tried them, but as I said, I haven’t driven one myself.
I’m glad to learn that Coel thinks himself a ‘pretty anti-censorship sort of guy’. Perhaps he might broaden his horizons and address censorship that does not derive from his bête noire, the ‘“must denigrate anyone non-woke” crowd’, particularly on a website that stands against such censorship. He might begin this broadening of his horizons by reading this article in The Atlantic: ‘The Book That Exposed Anti-Black Racism in the Classroom:
As African American studies faces resistance, a conversation about the continued relevance of Carter G. Woodson’s 1933 book, The Mis-education of the Negro’, by Ibram X. Kendi. Though I fear the name of Kendi will discourage him from doing so.
From the Guardian – more on our highly successful Elon’s antics:
Twitter chief executive Elon Musk rallied a team of roughly 80 engineers to reconfigure the platform’s algorithm so his tweets would be more widely viewed, tech news site Platformer has reported.
A disgruntled Musk called for an emergency effort after a tweet he sent during Sunday’s Super Bowl game failed to achieve as much engagement as a tweet from Joe Biden, interviews and internal documents reviewed by Platformer have revealed.
***
Engineers…deployed a new algorithm that artificially inflated Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000, ensuring that more than 90% of Musk’s 128.9m followers see them.
***
Amid ongoing criticisms of his decisions as chief executive, Musk has promised to step down and find a replacement as soon as later this year. Current employees have described a harrowing environment at the company, which laid off nearly half its workforce in November 2022.
Oh, the tweet linked to is posted by our Elon himself; it shows someone forcing the contents of a large bottle of tweet down the gullet of an unwilling female member of the twitterati, who is being held by her hair. She doesn’t look very happy about it.
I completely agree. The idea that he’s a software genius, or even that he has a passing understanding of how software works or is written, is a myth. Some of the things he’s said show that he has no idea at all what he’s talking about.
I’ve seen no evidence at all that he’s a genius in any other field, but plenty that he’s foolish and narcissistic, to say the least.
I do indeed enjoy these commentries from the “Twitter will collapse in a heap now that Musk is running it” crowd and the “must denigrate anyone non-woke” crowd!
Hilton wants to stay away from his rockets and cars does he? So who might know about rockets? Maybe NASA, who contract most of their launches to SpaceX these days. Then there’s the long queue of commerical customers for SpaceX launches. They produce more launches, more reliably and much cheaper, than anyone else. Who else has developed rockets that land themselves and can be reused?
As for cars, well Tesla cars regularly top polls for user satisfaction. Maybe people who drive the cars know more about this than Hilton?
On other comments on Musk by Hilton:
Musk and his brother each got $14,000 from their dad to found their first company. Hardly major wealth.
Four years later they sold that company for $300 million. Musk re-invested his share into a new company that became PayPal. Three years later it was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. (Musk’s share was $175 million, quite an increase on $14,000 in 7 years. This is not “inherited wealth”.)
That was then re-invested in Tesla and SpaceX and other things …
So if Hilton thinks this is just playing roulette, maybe he could give us a list of all of Musk’s failed companies …
The “decamped to Mastadon” crowd are just mighty pissed that woke people like them no longer get to be in charge of “curating” what can be said on Twitter.
The premise is that once you make a certain amount of money, you automatically become a genius.
Now I don’t know anything about that, but Bubba Gump Shrimp has more money than Davy Crockett.
Ah yes, instead the “trafficked” nutter and paedo obsessed Eliza Bleu gets to curate shit instead…
Twitter isn’t better, a different set of narcissistic pricks are running the madhouse now, that’s it.
@latsot:
I suspect that Musk does little hands-on coding these days, but his first company was an internet/website company that he founded with his brother. At the start there were only 3 people in it. Musk was the one who did most of the coding, working at it all hours of the day.
The fact that, 4 years later, they sold the company to Compaq Computer for $300 million rather suggests that Elon was not a complete numpty at software.
All this Musk-hating is rather at odds with reality.
[ And when he was aged 12 he wrote a computer game and sold it to a magazine for $500. Not bad, in terms of both coding and entrepreneurship, for a 12-yr-old. ]
If you can identify anyone on this site who denigrates people for being “non-woke”, I wish you would give examples. This site spends at least as much time being skeptical of being woke as being skeptical of “non-woke”.
i see little to suggest Musk is a genius, but I am no specialist in his fields. I do see evidence that he will not listen to people who are more knowledgeable than he is, and if that is the case, than no matter how smart he is, he isn’t smart. That’s Trump.
As for who is buying his stuff, that may be as much about marketing as anything else. That is one place I do think Musk is either genius or hires geniuses, because he has been a top-class marketer of his main product – him. As for NASA, remember they are the ones that bought the faulty O-ring. I don’t take their purchase choices as indication of anything but lowest bidder.
Government purchases are, in fact, often not an indication of highest quality, since they are required to go lowest bidder. Which is why I have spent a number of years of my life working on equipment that is not quite up to the standard needed to meet the standard of quality required of employees. Somehow we meet that standard, though our equipment is substandard. So don’t tell me that NASA or people lining up for his launches is proof of anything; I’ll wait and see what happens in a few years.
True modern polymaths are probably as rare as Bigfoot, but there are people with specialized genius that allows them to have great success. Often, however, such people mistakenly believe success in one arena translates to all others. I see this all the time in my area of work – even giant corporations with enormous resources from other endeavors often break their pick on my industry because they assume success in one business gives them an edge in all others.
@iknklast:
The comment was aimed at Rod Hilton, quoted in the OP, and similar people. But I am pretty convinced that a lot of the hostility to Musk and his takeover of Twitter is because he is anti-woke (and because he is successful and a billionaire, neither of which endears him to today’s US left). Again, I’m talking in general, not specifically about people here.
People say all sorts of things about him, another one is that his companies are only successful because he hires a lot of very good people and lets them get on with it (this one has a lot of truth in it). Does he really not listen to more-knowledgable people? Well, again, judge him on his track record.
NASA and commerical companies also care about reliability, since, even if they insure their satellite, a failure still costs them several years “opportunity cost”.
And we already are several years downstream. This from wiki:
“Falcon 9 Full Thrust began launch operations in December 2015. As of 12 February 2023, Falcon 9 Full Thrust had performed 183 launches without any failures. … this rocket is the most reliable orbital launch vehicle currently in operation”.
SpaceX are currently making many more launches than anyone else, while also having the best reliability record, and while also being the lowest bidder.
And yet, if you listen to Rod Hilton, you should “stay the hell away” from them.
@iknklast:
Sorry, forgot to add:
Tesla don’t advertise and don’t really have a marketing department. They’ve never had to, they’ve always had a waiting list of people wanting to buy Teslas as fast as they can produce them. A good product sells itself, and they have (so far) had the best electric cars.
You think so? I’d say that is one area where it is easy to fault him.
Coel, Tesla may not advertise, but it is marketed. If it weren’t, I would not have heard of it. Sending out press releases that are picked up by major news organizations is a form of advertising. Even if he doesn’t do that, somehow he is getting the name of his product out there.
It would not be such a large company if it were not finding a way to get the product in front of people. Advertising can be extremely subtle, and marketing is more than advertising.
Really? Then why do so many people know who he is? Good publicity, bad publicity – as P. T. Barnum said, there is no such thing as bad publicity. I maintain that he is an extremely successful marketer; if everyone knows your name, and your product, then in fact, you have not failed at marketing.
OK, re-phrase, Tesla hasn’t done paid advertising. The message gets out there because the media are happy to talk about Tesla cars a lot without being paid to do so.
Sort of like the 2016 Trump campaign. Hillary gets a lot of flack for outspending him by a large margin, but the media wasn’t as eager to put her on the front page, and every other page of the paper, every day of the campaign. He didn’t need to spend to advertise, but he was a major self-promoter and got his name out there.
Musk does the same thing. Intentionally? I would think so.
Pliny #7
Yes.
He (hired the people who) greatly cut the cost of putting stuff in orbit, by learning how to make 1st stages of rockets reusable. SpaceX might get the whole thing reusable soon.
Being very good at one thing doesn’t necessarily make one good at other things.
We shall see whether he botches remaking Twitter.
From the US website ‘Popular Information’:
‘Twitter, under the control of DeSantis-supporter Elon Musk, is attempting to undermine Popular Information’s reporting. The platform appended a “Community Note” to our viral thread about Florida classroom libraries, indicating that our tweets were “misleading.”
‘The note appended by Twitter was false. The Manatee County School District explicitly instructed its teachers to “[r]emove or cover all classroom libraries” or risk criminal charges. I obtained the document distributed to principals and teachers, which you can read HERE.’
‘This is a problem: Over the last four years, half of Popular Information’s readers found out about this newsletter on Twitter. Now, we can no longer count on Twitter to sustain our growth.’
And here is the opening paragraph from an article by Margaret Atwood in The Atlantic:
‘It’s shunning time in Madison County, Virginia, where the school board recently banished my novel The Handmaid’s Tale from the shelves of the high-school library. I have been rendered “unacceptable.” Governor Glenn Youngkin enabled such censorship last year when he signed legislation allowing parents to veto teaching materials they perceive as sexually explicit.’
“Community Notes” are Twitter’s new method for dealing with false information. They’re not put there by Twitter, they are put there by other users. Then, users can flag them as “useful” or not. In other words, it is a crowd-sourced response to possibly false or misleading Tweets.
The advantage of this is that the process is out in the open. If you think a “Community Note” is wrong (and the original Tweet correct), then you can add a reply saying that. Just as users need to evaluate Tweets, they need to evaluate Community Notes.
This is better than deletion or shadow-banning or outright banning that is both hidden and done by unaccountable moderators.
No system for dealing with false information will be perfect, but this system strikes me as worth a try.
And, obviously, a new method for dealing with true information that someone dislikes, and one which may well lead to a pile-on by that someone’s dishonourable ideological pals.
What strikes me most about Coel’s evasions and his carefully practiced admissions, or non-admissions, that he was wrong (as in his response to iknklast, which is couched in such a way as to suggest that he considers the matter at issue to be trivial and beneath him) is the oh-so-reasonable tone — except when he gets on to the ‘“must denigrate anyone non-woke” crowd’, amongst whom he appears to include anyone who disagrees with his ideological position. Does he not see the hypocrisy in his incessant trotting out of horrid examples of ‘wokeness’ even as he ignores the many examples of attempts at censorship, and actual censorship, by people who espouse his own views, of books by writers like Toni Morison and Margaret Atwood, or, say, Bari Weiss’s attempts to smear Arab academics who criticised the policies of the Israeli government and to ruin their careers, and her subsequent lies about her behaviour?
I might add that this ‘new method for dealing with false information’ is in fact no method at all.
So Tim, why do you consider it worthwhile to make a whole comment that is pretty much just a personal attack? That’s what’s wrong with discourse today. Aren’t the actual issues more important?
As for Twitter’s “community notes”, if you’re interested you can look into the ways in which they’re trying to ensure they don’t become ideological. Whether that works, well, we’ll have to see. I don’t think there is an idea method of dealing with false information.
What evasions?
Well you’re right there, I suggest that most people would already have interpreted my original comment as being about paid advertising. And suggesting that the success of Tesla cars and SpaceX rockets is mostly about “marketing” is rather silly.
I apologise for not being histrionic and tribal. Histrionic and tribal responses are sadly lacking on the internet these days.
No-one who espouses my views supports such censorship. I’m a pretty anti-censorship sort of guy.
Having done a stint in marketing when I was desperate for a job, I stand by my comment.
And isn’t saying I’m silly rather an insulting, personal comment?
And one thing I learned from the marketing seminars I was required to attend is that the most effective marketing is what doesn’t look like marketing.
Of course they are successful because of marketing; just not what a lot of people think of as marketing. It isn’t commercials on your favorite sit com or the Superbowl; it’s carefully cultivated media presence. A disturbing number of things in newscasts these days are things a corporation made and sent to the news; the news rarely reports that, of course, but they use them because it saves them money.
You don’t get your name out there by not telling anyone who you are. The press is not likely to notice you unless they have a reason. However subtle marketing may be, it is still marketing.
^ Very important point.
Hi iknklast, just for starters, you can’t develop the world’s first reusable rocket, and have them be the world’s most reliable launch vehicle just by clever marketing, you need good engineering.
And coming top in customer-satisfaction surveys is quite hard if you’re using good marketing to sell duff cars. (Especially if all the other car makers worldwide, starting with far bigger resources, are trying their best at marketing and car making also.)
So, no, the track record of Musk’s companies is not primarily about marketing. Primarily it’s about engineering.
I write much better novels than many of the ones getting published, but I am lousy at marketing. It isn’t JUST the quality of the product (there are a lot of shit-quality products that are selling quite well, regardless of what economic theory says), but clever marketing that encourages people to try them out. It doesn’t matter how great your product is; there has to be marketing. No one walked into Tesla and bought a car because it was well-made; they walked into Tesla and bought a car because they heard of it, and heard it was well-made.
This truth is obscure, apparently. Noting that marketing is what is selling his cars is not suggesting they are crap cars; I don’t know, I haven’t driven one and don’t wish to. I refuse to plug an electric car into coal powered electricity, and right now, that is my option. But the best made product in the world gets nowhere if no one knows it exists. And it isn’t going along on its own getting everyone to buy it without some form of marketing.
I have decided not to engage anymore with someone who not only chooses to interpret what I am saying incorrectly, but also calls me silly.
Okay, I’ll engage once again.
The most popular burger in the United States is McDonald’s. One of the crappiest hamburgers ever conceived is McDonald’s.
Being the most popular does not mean being the best. Again, maybe Tesla is; I’ve heard otherwise from people who have tried them, but as I said, I haven’t driven one myself.
I’m glad to learn that Coel thinks himself a ‘pretty anti-censorship sort of guy’. Perhaps he might broaden his horizons and address censorship that does not derive from his bête noire, the ‘“must denigrate anyone non-woke” crowd’, particularly on a website that stands against such censorship. He might begin this broadening of his horizons by reading this article in The Atlantic: ‘The Book That Exposed Anti-Black Racism in the Classroom:
As African American studies faces resistance, a conversation about the continued relevance of Carter G. Woodson’s 1933 book, The Mis-education of the Negro’, by Ibram X. Kendi. Though I fear the name of Kendi will discourage him from doing so.
From the Guardian – more on our highly successful Elon’s antics:
Twitter chief executive Elon Musk rallied a team of roughly 80 engineers to reconfigure the platform’s algorithm so his tweets would be more widely viewed, tech news site Platformer has reported.
A disgruntled Musk called for an emergency effort after a tweet he sent during Sunday’s Super Bowl game failed to achieve as much engagement as a tweet from Joe Biden, interviews and internal documents reviewed by Platformer have revealed.
***
Engineers…deployed a new algorithm that artificially inflated Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000, ensuring that more than 90% of Musk’s 128.9m followers see them.
***
Amid ongoing criticisms of his decisions as chief executive, Musk has promised to step down and find a replacement as soon as later this year. Current employees have described a harrowing environment at the company, which laid off nearly half its workforce in November 2022.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1625368108461613057/photo/1
Oh, the tweet linked to is posted by our Elon himself; it shows someone forcing the contents of a large bottle of tweet down the gullet of an unwilling female member of the twitterati, who is being held by her hair. She doesn’t look very happy about it.