Destruction, Terror and Mayhem

Editor's Note

Hello from London!

I feel like the run in to the end of the year is a long sprint. And there are hurdles along the way. In technology, there are currently multiple firefights. I mentioned "the pause" last week - but it's worth highlighting two other fires. That crypto one (I've linked two great overview pieces below) and our friend Mr Musk.

Vox summed it up with their headline: Billionaires are a dual-use technology. With all that has happened this week at Twitter, it seems we are at a knife edge on whether Twitter will remain a viable company. That would be $44bn blown into smithereens in a matter of weeks. That might be small fry compared to both Amazon and Microsoft losing circa a trillion dollars in value.

What seems to be happening behind the scenes is a massive pivot - business models, operations, people - everything. It seems destructive. It seems like mayhem - but we should note Musk's previous impact.

 in the early months of Covid-19, billionaire-funded Fast Grants got money quickly to promising research into treatments and vaccines, even as the expedited NIH approval process for funding still left many talented researchers with no way to get the money they needed for crucial Covid research.

There's much good that Musk aims to do, but with the good comes the flip.

To start a ludicrously successful company in the US these days, and not sell it to Google or whoever and retire quietly with a sizable fortune, you need to be an unusual sort of person. Elon Musk’s greatest fans and greatest critics would presumably agree on this much: He is a particularly vivid example of just that. He’s clearly great at some of the fundamentals of running a business — most people, after all, could not leverage the investor capital he received into multiple successful businesses in tough industries. He also makes costly, terrible decisions all the time. It’s quite possible these tendencies go hand in hand — the precise traits that made him decide he could do spaceflight better than anyone else are also the ones that made him decide he could tweet out a harebrained solution to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

What is it with these billionaires?

What's happening at Twitter is a fast escalation on what we discussed a few weeks ago - social media is dead - and I urge you to read my first recommended piece below.

Stay Curious,

Onward! - Rahim

PS. You know you're coming to Christmas when

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