Thumbs Up or Down?
At some point we will all be held accountable because of the decisions and the choices we have made, and the paths we have taken.
December, 2022. The news outlets were aflutter with stories about the Twitter takeover. One of my college classmates posted a simple question to our MIT alumni chat channel: Melon Husk. Thumbs up or thumbs down?
I was not surprised at the initial responses: a fifty-fifty split. Our chat group spans the political and ideological spectrum. Very few are in tech, and when I say “tech”, I mean Silicon Valley tech. Some only read the headlines and digest their news from reputable outlets, like the Wall Street Journal and the Economist and the Financial Times (many of them went into finance after reading Liar’s Poker in the late eighties). The majority were not privy to the detailed goings on of a Silicon Valley behemoth, you had to have been a part of the beast—the Valley—to really understand what was happening, and the impact it was having on employees, users, partners.
A collapsing ecosystem being gutted from the inside, a cesspool that was already severely flawed… a simple thumbs down would not suffice.
“You guys know I love you all. [We’d all spent a recent reunion at the funeral for one of our fraternity brothers who’d succumbed to MS after a twenty-year fight. It was as if a week had passed, not decades, since we’d all shared the house on Beacon Street.]
“Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Boring Co., and now emperor of Twitter.
“His companies have been accused of rampant racism and sexism. He runs companies with facilities that have significant violations of public health orders. He has engaged in and been accused of securities fraud. He’s destroyed whistleblowers’ lives, he’s accused a cave diver/rescuer of a Thai youth soccer team of being a pedophile, with no data. He’s insulted politicians, CEO’s, philanthropists, he’s questioned the benefits of covid vaccines, he’s questioned whether covid was even a pandemic*. And now he’s presided over the most disastrous downsizing in the history of tech.
“He paid (overpaid) $54.20 per share for Twitter, a number he specifically chose because 4.20 is the biggest cannabis sales day in the U.S. (and Hitler’s birthday, but whatever). Why? Because he thought it was funny. Let that sink in. And he tweets nonsensically (one wonders why) in the wee hours of the night, only to later delete his (incomprehensible) tweets. Maybe Walter Isaacson will let us in on the genius of this. [Gary Shteyngart has a wonderful review of the book in The Guardian.]
“Yes, you need to be brilliant and slightly unhinged to create great companies, look at Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Square, to name a few. But there are limits. Think about it this way: would Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and Boring Co.—innovative, material achievements—have been possible without the insults and the sexism and the racism and the violations and the put-downs and the fraud?
“There are morals and ethics in play here. If you can look at yourself in the mirror every day and are happy with what you see, you’re able to dream happy dreams and think happy thoughts with no remorse, then have at it. At some point we will all be held accountable because of the decisions and the choices we have made, and the paths we have taken.
“Thumbs down.”
*Source: Vanity Fair, “A reminder of just some of the terrible things Elon Musk has said and done”, April 2022.
