Hiltzik: Is Elon Musk a genius or an idiot?

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 automobile firm, making a worthwhile marketplace for a wholly new expertise? 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, a lot of whom see him as a savior of a globally warming Earth or, alternatively, the savior of humanity by his plan to transport civilization to an unpolluted Mars.

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

The doubts originated together with his whimsical supply 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 authentic agreed value.

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

Maybe that’s excessive. However 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 prime executives. Since then, he has taken a sequence of steps which have unnerved the platform’s group 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 prime 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 id verification coverage, which ensured that distinguished account holders have been who they mentioned they have been and endowed their profiles with a blue checkmark, with a system awarding the blue examine to anybody keen 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 change 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 accordance with the info evaluation agency Dataminr, quoted by Bloomberg.

Uncertainty in regards to the tone of content material on Twitter has prompted a minimum of momentary advert suspensions by Normal Motors, Audi, Normal Mills, Mondelez (the maker of Oreos), Pfizer and quite a few different firms, in accordance with their statements and different experiences.

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 name & shame.”

None of this, clearly, is prone to make Twitter seem like a extra alluring vacation spot to advertisers. Whether or not they in the end return, one would assume that any model managers at shopper firms who advise their bosses that now’s the time to double down with their spending on Twitter might be putting their careers in jeopardy. No firm led by even marginally clever executives needs to danger its fame by associating with tweets celebrating racism, antisemitism or hatefulness generally.

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 common for somebody with a distinguished and completed 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 crew that invented the transistor at Bell Laboratories. His administration expertise have been so atrocious that he single-handedly destroyed his personal firm, Shockley Semiconductor.

He subsequently turned identified for advocating the overtly racist theory that welfare and reduction applications prevented pure choice from killing off “the underside of the inhabitants,” giving “inferior strains” resembling (in his view) Black folks, “elevated possibilities for survival and copy.”

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 Challenge for the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, veered into asserting that Black persons are intellectually inferior to whites and attributing the distinction to genetic components.

The claims turned him 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 college who has written about the career 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 peers 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 change into a hero to fringe folks, after which they embrace you,” Moore informed me. “When you’ve got that psychological want for some form of affirmation from folks you’re interacting with, it should be very seductive.”

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

One would possibly level to Joseph Ladapo, a graduate of Harvard Medical College and former college member at UCLA Medical College, 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 might 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 could be the observations of Oxford psychologist Kevin Dutton in his 2012 ebook “The Knowledge of Psychopaths.”

Dutton defines psychopaths as not essentially violent or felony 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 have to be saved underneath management. “In case you push all of them to max,” Dutton argues, the product might be “no use to anybody.” But when they’re wielded by diploma, “you could effectively have a surgeon who’s a minimize above the remainder.”

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 lure of hubris by misreading the success of Tesla and SpaceX as testaments to his private knowledge. Each firms, nevertheless, 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 courting to 2006, in accordance with the subsidy tracker on the nonprofit Good Jobs First. That determine doesn’t embrace a $465-million loan issued by the Division of Vitality in 2010 to assist fund Tesla’s electrical automobile expertise improvement, which has been repaid.

Nor does it embrace the federal rebate of as much as $7,500 that Tesla patrons acquired by the top of 2019, a complete of greater than $1.5 billion spent to make Teslas extra reasonably priced. The credit score expired after Tesla bought its 200,000th automobile. It’ll resume subsequent yr, 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; a minimum of 18 different states have had some type of incentive program in place.

These subsidies noticed Tesla by durations during which its monetary weaknesses would possibly in any other case have led to the corporate’s extinction.

Tesla additionally has benefited from being the one recreation on the town for a lot of its existence, as the corporate hasn’t confronted severe competitors within the mass marketplace for electrical automobiles till very not too long ago and rivals are nonetheless within the strategy of tooling up.

Musk should notice that Tesla is going through plenty of headwinds simply now. The corporate’s inventory has fallen by 50% because it peaked virtually precisely one yr 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 completely different from each these firms. 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 biggest. For advertisers, Twitter is a advertising and marketing possibility, and even earlier than Musk’s takeover, not essentially 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 crucial memorable advertising and marketing blunders ever.” Its lesson was that you simply shouldn’t make abrupt adjustments to your product that alienate your previous 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 operate; the corporate has began to ask some fired employees again to work.

The issue could also be that Musk noticed Twitter by 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 in addition attracted a surfeit of pretend accounts and bots. A few of his mates 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 way in which he did, as a result of he made no effort to find out how Twitter seemed to the typical consumer and its advertisers.

It’s attainable that Musk’s take-no-prisoners method will make Twitter stronger in time. In the mean time, nevertheless, 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 might have seemed like a enterprise genius prior to now, however in the intervening time the one factor he has completed with Twitter is to make himself look silly.