this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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This "he isn't an idiot" or "not enough of an idiot" is the wrong way to think about things. Smart people believe all sorts of dumb things, and plenty of smart people can delude themselves, especially when they surround themselves with "yes men".
The other thing is X isn't the only social media platform, nor was ever a particularly large one as users go. Getting rid of Twitter just pushes people to threads, mastodon, bluesky and others. It doesn't actually shut down much speech at all.
I think the non-conspiracy thinking is just - Musk was addicted to twitter, liked saying edgy and engaging stuff and because of what was more of a boast but legally was a binding sort of offer to buy ended up forced to buy Twitter. The legal forces were well documented at the time. Now that Musk has Twitter, he decided to make it into what he always professed it should be, along with his egomania has made it more and more like any number of "free speech absolutest" spin offs that turned into right wing cesspools that regular people find less and less appealing, and advertisers really find concerning.
People who think there's some huge conspiracy everywhere have never worked for a narcissist executive. It feels like an extension of "they're rich and powerful means they have to be cunning", no they clearly get caught up in their own delusions of aptitude.
Think of all the group projects you've ever worked on and multiply that by huge egos. I find it hard to believe that any of these people can coordinate with the level of precision most conspiracy theories claim. Do they happen? Definitely. Is it as commonplace as they think? Definitely not.
Americans have an innate cultural belief that if someone has money, they are therefore smart. It doesn't matter how the person got their money - whether they inherited at birth, or they stole it, or they had a relative who won the lottery. In the US, we will defer decisions to others who we perceive to have wealth because it is a cultural belief.
This is, of course, obviously wrong. A person who is born into wealth as an infant has no influence on their own success any more than any other infant.
There is also a culture where those who are born into wealth also believe they are smarter than everyone else, and the lack of accountability in their lives often leads to wildly incorrect business ventures, doubling down on narcissistic behavior, and a complete disconnect with how 99% of the human population thinks and lives.
Elon Musk has lost $40 billion dollars worth of value in just over a year on one business venture. He won't be able to make Twitter work, because he doesn't have any better ideas than anyone else who ran Twitter. He's also quickly proving that his ideas are far worse. There's no grand plan. There's no conspiracy. He's just a lazy rich kid who smokes weed all day and thinks he's a genius.
Agreed. That’s why I really dislike the theory it’s some 4D chess. More prof of that is if he wanted it to burn he wouldn’t have renamed it his precious X.com. He wants to still show the world what PayPal would have been if they hadn’t removed him. The same reason he wanted to review all of the code and be in charge of development at X, he still is holding onto the image he’s a rockstar dev and everyone else just doesn’t know what they’re doing.
The sad fact is he may be intelligent in some stuff, but he also lucked out. And as you said he’s increasingly got surrounded by “yes men”, and let go of the people that had tried to mitigate some of tendencies. Not realizing they helped get him to where he was. Even in the original x.com days he had someone help manage and buffer him because he had the tendency to scare off investors.
I was starting to think I was the only person around here that wasn’t falling for conspiracy theories.
I work in the physics world and I am continually surprised by how dumb smart people can be, especially if ego is involved.