MARTIN: Lee says Musk pushed past those errors, and the success of Tesla today is undeniable. And so we have these kind of self-inflicted errors. He also referred to a cave rescuer in Thailand as a pedo guy, which led to a defamation lawsuit. And at the same time, Musk had this ill-considered tweet where he said he had funding, he could Tesla private, which turned out not to be true. LEE: In 2018, Teslas had a very chaotic period when they were just launching the Model 3 and having trouble kind of ramping it up. MARTIN: Still, Lee points out that in the past, Musk has weathered similar storms on the way to success. They're very fast and seem pretty erratic, so I'm a little less bullish on him than I was when I wrote the piece a week ago. LEE: I was not impressed by the way he handled the layoffs. A few days into the Twitter tumult, he wrote an article for Slate called "The Case That Elon Musk Knows Exactly What He's Doing At Twitter." It's a headline that seems surprising in the current moment, and he concedes that as events continue to unfold, it does sound a little overconfident. MARTIN: Timothy Lee writes for the technology, economics and public policy newsletter Full Stack Economics. TIMOTHY LEE: I think Musk just has a management style where he manages to get pretty good results in the long run, despite a lot of short-run chaos. MARTIN: The Twitter takeover has played out like a classic train wreck, but is that all there is to the story? Could there be a method to Musk's madness? And what does it mean for the rest of us? What does the future of Twitter hold for tens of millions of users with more at stake than financial gain? I think at the moment it's a bit of just throwing things on the wall, seeing what sticks and, you know, kind of just winging it a bit. You know, on the other side, he's already banning people while telling us this was all about free speech. And so you can see the layoffs as a step to try to make money. VANCE: It's not been a very profitable business throughout its existence. MARTIN: Speaking to NPR this week, Vance said a lot of the confusion stems from two competing realities - Musk's controversial view of free speech - anything goes at any time - but also the failure of the platform to make money. And it's, I think, even more chaotic than anyone could have expected. VANCE: I think people were a bit worried about how things would play out. MARTIN: Ashlee Vance wrote a biography of Musk in 2017. And even with all that hot mess, tech observers say it could get worse.ĪSHLEE VANCE: (Laughter) It's been quite extraordinary. A flood of fake accounts resulted from a change in the blue check verification process that allowed anyone to buy verification for $8 a month. It's estimated that half of Twitter's global workforce was summarily laid off. Musk later deleted the link to a right-wing site known for pushing fake stories about left-leaning targets. A few days later, Musk himself shared a link to a false conspiracy theory about the violent attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi. MARTIN: Within hours of Musk's team closing the $44 billion deal, anti-Semitic and racist tweets surged on the platform. Imagine having so much money, you think it's a good idea to buy hell. JAMES CORDEN: Forty-four billion dollars. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LATE LATE SHOW") It's been only a couple of weeks since billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter, and the ensuing, well, chaos has been late-night comedy gold. TREVOR NOAH: You know, this whole thing happening with Elon Musk and Twitter reminds me of - I think it was Mike Tyson who had that line where he said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. JOHN OLIVER: Elon Musk making big moves as he starts running Twitter - potentially into the ground. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER")
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