Item — HN Reader

> The odds are that Twitter will probably be dead in a year.

And that's based on what exactly?

> He'll bring on a few yes-men executives that'll applaud him

Again, based on what?

Now here's a prediction actually based on Musk's past perf:

He'll bring in people who get shit done, and get it done fast. Twitter will achieve things everyone says is stupid, ridiculous and impossible now as he's done in the past 20 years with Tesla and SpaceX.

That will be followed by a large swath of copy-cats who will try to replicate it to no avail.

2 comments

You're assuming that the attributes that lead to success in those companies will also carry across. Social media is not just an engineering problem. Elon's personal brand and his temperament is a massive liability for something like Twitter.

> Social media is not just an engineering problem.

What you makes you think Tesla is just an engineering problem?

You have regulation, laws protecting dealers, government negotiations, lobbying (and that's just from top of my head) and not to forget, large distributed software and hardware infrastructure

SpaceX: strong relationships with customers, dealing with lots of government and private companies that are paying you millions of dollars, etc.

> You're assuming that the attributes that lead to success in those companies will also carry across.

There are many attributes across the board that is needed to succeed in a scale of those companies. Even in Musk's existing companies, he's most definitly not suited to do certain tasks. It's well known and that Gwen Shotwell is a huge part of SpaceX'es success to date. I agree that social network requires its own area of knowledge and experience, but Musk isn't literally doing all this by himself. He attracts talent and that's the key.

That worked when Musk bought a functional company and added his brand of PR on top. Not for saving a company in trouble.

> a functional company and added his brand of PR on top

Which company would that be?