Hiltzik: Is Elon Musk a genius or an fool?

On the coronary heart of Elon Musk’s public persona is his picture as an engineering and managerial genius.

How else might he construct Tesla into the world’s main electrical car firm, making a worthwhile marketplace for a wholly new know-how? Or strip down the prices of house flight to show SpaceX into the low-cost bid-winner for presidency rocket launching?

Musk’s picture has received him a legion of adoring followers, lots of whom see him as a savior of a globally warming Earth or, alternatively, the savior of humanity by way of his plan to move civilization to an unpolluted Mars.

That picture has taken a success in current months, because of Musk’s misadventure with Twitter.

The doubts originated along with his whimsical provide final April to purchase the social media platform for $44 billion, his clear wriggling to get out of the vastly overpriced deal, and his final capitulation within the face of the near-certain prospect {that a} Delaware court docket would order him to finish the transaction on the unique agreed value.

Musk’s actions since taking up Twitter on Oct. 27 have been so harmful to the platform’s functioning and popularity that the query is raised of whether or not, quite than being a genius, Musk is the truth is an fool.

Maybe that’s excessive. Nevertheless it’s correct to look at how and why somebody so unquestionably profitable in his enterprise profession so far has gone off the rails now.

The doubts about whether or not Musk is aware of what he’s doing have intensified within the 11 days since he assumed possession of Twitter.

On his first day in cost, he fired the corporate’s high executives. Since then, he has taken a collection of steps which have unnerved the platform’s neighborhood of greater than 200 million customers and prompted its most necessary advertisers to droop their Twitter advert campaigns.

Amongst different issues, Musk fired Twitter’s high administration and a big cadre of the employees assigned to screening tweets for hateful and bigoted content material and blocking offenders.

He has changed Twitter’s identification verification coverage, which ensured that distinguished account holders have been who they stated they have been and endowed their profiles with a blue checkmark, with a system awarding the blue verify to anybody prepared to pay $7.99 a month for it.

Musk has additionally issued complicated and contradictory tweets about his method to content material moderation within the guise of upholding “free speech.” That has left customers questioning whether or not Twitter is about to develop into a haven for hatemongers, racists and antisemites.

Within the first day after Musk took over, tweets utilizing the “n-word” elevated by 1,300%, in keeping with the information evaluation agency Dataminr, quoted by Bloomberg.

Uncertainty in regards to the tone of content material on Twitter has prompted not less than momentary advert suspensions by Basic Motors, Audi, Basic Mills, Mondelez (the maker of Oreos), Pfizer and quite a few different corporations, in keeping with their statements and different reviews.

Musk has responded to the suspensions truculently. In a Nov. 4 tweet he blamed the suspensions on “activist teams pressuring advertisers.” He added, “They’re making an attempt to destroy free speech in America.” (It’s unclear whether or not he was referring to the advertisers or the purported “activist teams.”)

In a subsequent tweet, he threatened to topic fleeing advertisers to “a thermonuclear identify & disgrace.”

None of this, clearly, is more likely to make Twitter seem like a extra alluring vacation spot to advertisers. Whether or not they finally return, one would suppose that any model managers at client corporations who advise their bosses that now’s the time to double down with their spending on Twitter will probably be inserting their careers in jeopardy. No firm led by even marginally clever executives desires to danger its popularity by associating with tweets celebrating racism, antisemitism or hatefulness usually.

What Musk doesn’t seem to acknowledge is that his personal conduct is driving away customers and advertisers. Since his takeover, he retweeted a crude, crass and fabricated conspiracy concept in regards to the violent assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco).

He additionally retweeted, approvingly, a quote ostensibly defending free speech and generally however erroneously attributed to Voltaire; it’s extra reliably attributed to an American neo-Nazi named Kevin Strom.

How might somebody so apparently sensible do such silly issues? To start with, it’s commonplace for somebody with a distinguished and achieved profession document to veer into crackpotism. Among the many finest identified examples in science and engineering are Nobel laureates William Shockley and James D. Watson.

Shockley acquired his Nobel in 1956 as a member of the workforce that invented the transistor at Bell Laboratories. His administration abilities have been so atrocious that he single-handedly destroyed his personal firm, Shockley Semiconductor.

He subsequently turned identified for advocating the overtly racist concept that welfare and aid applications prevented pure choice from killing off “the underside of the inhabitants,” giving “inferior strains” akin to (in his view) Black individuals, “elevated possibilities for survival and replica.”

Watson, who received his Nobel with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for his or her discovery of the double-helix construction of DNA and later headed the Human Genome Mission for the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, veered into asserting that Black persons are intellectually inferior to whites and attributing the distinction to genetic elements.

The claims turned him right into a scientific “unperson,” in his phrases, and misplaced him sinecures at enterprise and scientific establishments.

Each males’s arguments are contradicted by science.

The phenomenon “extends approach past science—it’s a human situation,” says John P. Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Cornell’s medical faculty who has written in regards to the profession of Peter Duesberg.

A distinguished UC Berkeley molecular biologist who claimed that HIV was not the reason for AIDS and described the illness as “a fabricated epidemic,” Duesberg was consequently “dismissed by his friends and ridiculed by his colleagues,” as Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal the Lancet, noticed in 1996.

Moore attributes a few of these renegade behaviors to midlife crises suffered by sensible people whose careers or skilled recognition hasn’t lived as much as their expectations. Racked by skilled jealousy, they search validation from different communities.

“You develop into a hero to fringe individuals, after which they embrace you,” Moore informed me. “If in case you have that psychological want for some type of affirmation from individuals you’re interacting with, it have to be very seductive.”

David Gorski, a veteran debunker of pseudoscience, identifies “hubris, vanity, and ego gratification” as traits of educated physicians who flip into quacks and anti-vaxxers.

One may level to Joseph Ladapo, a graduate of Harvard Medical Faculty and former school member at UCLA Medical Faculty, who has spearheaded Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ marketing campaign in opposition to the COVID vaccines and presumably receives validation from the approval of DeSantis, who appointed him.

These circumstances could not absolutely match Musk, although his emergence as a champion of anti-liberal conspiracy theories actually has made him a darling of the far proper. Extra related would be the observations of Oxford psychologist Kevin Dutton in his 2012 e-book “The Knowledge of Psychopaths.”

Dutton defines psychopaths as not essentially violent or prison however as those that are “fearless, assured, charismatic, ruthless, and targeted” — qualities that may be useful for, say, surgeons or professional athletes, and would appear to go well with Musk completely.

They must be saved underneath management. “For those who push all of them to max,” Dutton argues, the product will probably be “no use to anybody.” But when they’re wielded by diploma, “you might properly have a surgeon who’s a minimize above the remaining.”

Musk appears to have turned up his qualities of fearlessness, confidence and ruthlessness to the max. One consequence seems to be his resistance to studying something from enterprise historical past — or, certainly, from his personal enterprise profession.

Musk has fallen into the entice of hubris by misreading the success of Tesla and SpaceX as testaments to his private knowledge. Each corporations, nonetheless, have relied on uncommon, if not distinctive, benefits.

Tesla has collected huge authorities subsidies — $3.6 billion in federal and state grants, rebates and tax abatements relationship to 2006, in keeping with the subsidy tracker on the nonprofit Good Jobs First. That determine doesn’t embrace a $465-million mortgage issued by the Division of Vitality in 2010 to assist fund Tesla’s electrical car know-how growth, which has been repaid.

Nor does it embrace the federal rebate of as much as $7,500 that Tesla patrons acquired by way of the tip of 2019, a complete of greater than $1.5 billion spent to make Teslas extra inexpensive. The credit score expired after Tesla offered its 200,000th car. It can resume subsequent 12 months, albeit relevant solely to the corporate’s least costly sedan, the Mannequin 3.

Tesla patrons have additionally acquired a complete of $436 million in California state rebates; not less than 18 different states have had some type of incentive program in place.

These subsidies noticed Tesla by way of intervals through which its monetary weaknesses may in any other case have led to the corporate’s extinction.

Tesla additionally has benefited from being the one sport on the town for a lot of its existence, as the corporate hasn’t confronted critical competitors within the mass marketplace for electrical autos till very just lately and rivals are nonetheless within the technique of tooling up.

Musk should understand that Tesla is dealing with numerous headwinds simply now. The corporate’s inventory has fallen by 50% because it peaked virtually precisely one 12 months in the past.

As for SpaceX, it owes a lot of its success to its president and chief working officer, Gwynne Shotwell, who runs the day-to-day actions on the agency. Musk deserves credit score for hiring Shotwell away from Microcosm, an El Segundo rocket firm, and staying out of her approach whereas taking credit score for the corporate’s achievements as a authorities contractor.

Twitter is totally different from each of these corporations. Twitter isn’t in line for presidency handouts and even for its most devoted customers it isn’t near the one social media platform and nowhere close to the most important. For advertisers, Twitter is a advertising and marketing possibility, and even earlier than Musk’s takeover, not probably the most inviting one within the social media house.

Musk additionally hasn’t internalized the lesson taught by such advertising and marketing fiascos because the introduction of recent Coke in 1985, which the Coca-Cola Co. itself labels “one of the memorable advertising and marketing blunders ever.” Its lesson was that you just shouldn’t make abrupt adjustments to your product that alienate your outdated clients earlier than you’ve attracted new ones.

One other lesson is to not make adjustments in an organization till you perceive it. Musk bulldozed Twitter with undiscerning adjustments in its administration, insurance policies and personnel, sowing chaos in methods he plainly didn’t anticipate. After firing half its employees, he found that he eviscerated some departments Twitter must perform; the corporate has began to ask some fired employees again to work.

The issue could also be that Musk noticed Twitter by way of the lens of his personal expertise as a consumer. He had among the many largest consumer bases on the platform, and one which each adopted him slavishly and likewise attracted a surfeit of faux accounts and bots. A few of his buddies and followers have been getting suspended or banned from Twitter for abusive tweets, which affronted his private definition of “free speech.”

He thought everybody felt the best way he did, as a result of he made no effort to find out how Twitter regarded to the typical consumer and its advertisers.

It’s potential that Musk’s take-no-prisoners method will make Twitter stronger in time. For the time being, nonetheless, its very future is doubtful, hobbled by an estimated $1-billion annual curiosity invoice from Musk’s takeover debt whereas it hemorrhages customers and advertisers.

That’s all on him. He could have regarded like a enterprise genius prior to now, however in the intervening time the one factor he has achieved with Twitter is to make himself look silly.