Elon Musk Texts Parag Agrawal

https://twitter.com/techemails/status/1585804674170355712

by 0xedb • 4 years ago

68 95 4 years ago

Don’t forget the texts that triggered his offer to buy Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575598387335901190?s=...

Sateeshm• 4 years ago

Damn. I could be wrong, but the texts with Bret makes it look like Elon's ego was hurt, from texting with Parag.

tomjakubowski3• 4 years ago

What "heavy-duty" software did Musk write for a 20 year period? I can't square it with the career section in his Wikipedia bio.

Vecr• 4 years ago

Rocket flight control? I'm not sure that was 20 years in a row or how much he really does of it, but that's my guess.

tomjakubowski3• 4 years ago

He's the CEO. You think he's writing the flight control software?

dgrin912• 4 years ago

He made x.com, which was a financial service company that got bought by paypal. THen I think he worked at paypal for a while. Then he did spacex. Then he did tesla. All of those are very engineering heavy and he has been known to get into nitty gritty on all of them.

tomjakubowski3• 4 years ago

he has been known to get into nitty gritty

Is he writing any software at SpaceX or Tesla? I've heard stories here and there of him sitting in an engineering meeting.

Zip2 was founded in 1995 -- there are credible claims (from a biography) he wrote software there, and that's all I've found.

saenns• 4 years ago

highly doubt this guy wrote a single line of code at any of those companies

notacoward2• 4 years ago

Is there any actual evidence of him "getting into the nitty gritty" at SpaceX or Tesla? Confirmation from people who would have been there to see it? Or just his own claims? I don't think his time doing early web stuff at x.com or PayPal counts as "heavy duty" and it certainly wasn't 20 years.

recursv_thnkng• 4 years ago

There is none. The only thing anyone has referenced is some pre-PayPal code that got scrapped and rewritten in the merger and some games when he was a kid.

abudabi1232• 4 years ago

Look for his interviews. He mentions a software his organization wrote and sold, but the buyer didn't know how to fully take advantage of it. Kind of like flying an F22 as a cardboard box down the side of a grassy hill.

tedunangst• 4 years ago

He forced PayPal to switch to windows. Opinions differ as to the wisdom of that move.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12513223

JoeyBananas• 4 years ago

He worked in the video game industry at one point and wrote some low level code there.

dingosity• 4 years ago

I can assure you Mr. Musk was not involved in writing code at x.com. Though he was a very decent product-manager-type guy and generally more technical than most PMs. I believe he can understand many issues with code-bases, but he absolutely did not understand why we did things the way we did in the crypto(graphy) code at x.com.

solarkraft• 4 years ago

Sounds like you might have some anecdotes to share :-)

typeofhuman2• 4 years ago

So many HNers thought the deal wouldn't go through.

nkozyra4• 4 years ago

And so many thought it would.

Predicting the future is an imperfect science, as it turns out.

amusedcyclist• 4 years ago

Elon did try very hard to stop it.

MuffinFlavored3• 4 years ago

or was this all just theater?

wombatpm• 4 years ago

Because his 44billion dollar investment is worth 12 billion when the ink dries

prvc• 4 years ago

worth 12 billion

Why do you say this?

saalweachter• 4 years ago

I'm honestly not sure I'm more shocked it went through or more shocked he thought he could get out of that contract.

matwood• 4 years ago

4D chess on how to lose $30B…

macintux• 4 years ago

If you thought Elon was a genius, you figured he was just trolling the world and would weasel his way out of what seemed like a stupid deal.

If you thought he was a troll first and genius second, and paid attention to the analysts who read the fine print on the offer, you probably expected he was going to be hoisted by his own petard.

this_user• 4 years ago

The odds of the deal going ahead were always pretty good, because getting out of it would have been difficult. The key here is the unique way in which the Chancery Court operates. They may have very well forced Musk to buy the company.

superchroma5• 4 years ago

I believe that Elon plans multiple routes to account for possibilities when he does business. I believe he colluded with other parties to depress Twitter's share price through legal drama, firstly so they could profit by knowing the moves in advance, and secondly so he could try and force the valuation lower to save his own money money. I believe he has tried several strategies to get the US government to intervene and cancel the deal.

Maybe all that is wildly out of band, but we've seen him operate for years now. He routinely lies; that is, creates a message he wants a certain market to hear to achieve a certain effect, and in a couple of moments, despite his massive wealth, has demonstrated that he has a keen interest in acquiring more wealth.

rvz• 4 years ago

Exactly. Hence why so many HNers are extremely annoyed and angry that it happened and that they will still use Twitter regardless. I guarantee you that they won't move or close their accounts down due to this and will continue to peek or use links from Twitter.

I don't care what happens since I'm laughing at the whole mess and chaos.

_blz2• 4 years ago

I remember those threads, the confidence with which people were claiming 'Musk is just lying and will never ever go for it". Just tells you most people are susceptible to emotions even if they are otherwise rational. In this case, visceral contempt for Musk being against censorship.

nkozyra4• 4 years ago

contempt for Musk being against censorship.

Speaking of emotion, this is a far cry from a good faith read on this.

theonething7• 4 years ago

Yep, even here on HN.

I hope Musk turns Twitter around and makes it a great platform.

somebehemoth• 4 years ago

Just tells you most people are susceptible to emotions

This is not insightful and an obvious aspect of being human.

In this case, visceral contempt for Musk being against censorship.

This is an emotional opinion without the support of facts. Are you sure you are being rational?

Very nice glass house you have there.

kabes• 4 years ago

That's not how I recall it. In my experience, the general opinion here was that Musk indeed wanted to get out of the deal but that he was legally going to have to go with it. Which is what has happened.

awb2• 4 years ago

"I wrote heavy duty software"
"I interface way better with engineer who are able to do hardcore programming"

In 20+ years of developing, I've only heard non-technical (or well past their prime technical) folks use the terms "heavy duty" or "hardcore" to describe programming.

abudabi1232• 4 years ago

"heavy duty", "hardcore", "falcon heavy", "cybertruck". Those terms relate. I guess he means appreciating programming down to the electron, photon millisecond when debugging a lost rocket launch three times in a row burning his money in the sense of physics and not some kind of marketty arbitrary opaque name for flavor of framework, platform package container combo.

rurp• 4 years ago

How much "photon millisecond" level rocket debugging has Elon personally done?

spoils192• 4 years ago

Agreed. I'd expect the average HNer to emphasise with those terms as we all work in complicated and intense industries, but I guess there will always be disappointment as non-Conservatives join the World Wide Web.

Fatnino• 4 years ago

The name falcon heavy is a direct riff on the name delta 4 heavy. ULA just slaps 3 delta 4 first stages side by side and that's the heavy variant. Falcon heavy is the same thing but with falcon 9.

I don't think it has anything to do with heavy duty.

PainfullyNormal• 4 years ago

I've heard technical people use those terms when they're talking down (or up, depending on your perspective) to management.

typeofhuman2• 4 years ago

Jack and Elon discussing future protocol:

https://www.twitter.com/TechEmails/status/157558827770002636...

discardable_dan3• 4 years ago

I love the "can I call" texts he sends. It's neat to see boomers all act the same about texting.

concinds2• 4 years ago

Far from a Boomer attitude (they love calling and aren't as comfortable with texts), it's very much a Gen-Z attitude.

But these descriptors obviously make no sense when we're talking about CEOs, not random people for whom "age group" is a relevant or informative descriptor.

frumper• 4 years ago

He isn't in the boomer generation.

benwad• 4 years ago

This is really interesting, and for me it highlights the problem of tech/business people trying to solve a social problem. In their mind everything can be solved by tweaking the software architecture or monetisation model. Nothing is proposed to change how users actually interact with each other on the platform, which (IMHO) is the main problem.

cactusplant7374• 4 years ago

I would agree the problem is not software. The problem is people. Specifically people that spread and people that believe misinformation.

MuffinFlavored3• 4 years ago

how does Parag Agrawal come out of this looking "in the right"?

superchroma5• 4 years ago

he comes out of this quite wealthy, and, the man who made elon kneel, so I think he'll be all right.

theonething7• 4 years ago

man who made elon kneel

Uh, Elon just fired him.

discardable_dan3• 4 years ago

When Musk inevitably makes insane changes to Twitter, Parag gets to point at them and say "those are the thing I wouldn't do as quickly as he wanted."

kumarm• 4 years ago

Elon apparently used Tesla engineers to review Twitter code: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-eng...

Do Tesla employees work for Tesla or are they Elon's personal staff? How is acceptable when employees can be fired for moonlighting?

throwoutway• 4 years ago

I stopped trusting Bloomberg’s reporting after they refused to retract their “The Big Hack” which turned out to be bogus. Are there other sources for this?

skissane3• 4 years ago

Apparently, SpaceX has used Tesla engineers in the past, to help them evaluate/integrate Tesla parts into SpaceX designs. If Tesla is okay with doing consulting for one of Musk's other businesses, why not another?

Legally, Musk has to pay Tesla for this, and someone very senior at Tesla (the board or the senior executive team) has to approve – without Musk being in the room. But, why wouldn't they say "yes"?

So I don't think this story is fundamentally implausible. (As I pointed out in a comment on another post, the "code review" was probably actually an "architecture review", but it is easy for non-technical people to elide the difference.)

version_five• 4 years ago

This is probably more common than the context suggests. CEO/CTO that both claim deep technical skills while not having touched code in decades, one demanding to talk to engineers, the other claiming he's deep in the codebase and knows what's going on. The best executives I've worked with are the ones that freely admit they don't know about the code, the worst are the ones that insist they're "technical" and keep bringing up stuff from 20 years ago with no bearing on the current problem but believing they're sharing their technical expertise

outericky• 4 years ago

I read it more as CTO was protecting the engineers.

_coveredInBees• 4 years ago

Lol, I always find it funny when people pretend that Parag is some clueless "management type". I graduated the same year as him from the same school, and he is a ridiculously sharp engineer who has risen up at Twitter the old-fashioned way. It's painfully obvious that Musk just wants sycophantic yes-men around him and was pissed off that Parag wasn't willing to kiss his ass regarding all his "revolutionary" suggestions.

spoils192• 4 years ago

Can he invert a binary tree though?

usea• 4 years ago

Here's a sequence of events that led to me quitting a job:

- The owner/CEO of my company met with another local business owner and sold them on us doing some custom software work for them. He gave them an estimate during the meeting, and made a handshake deal.

- Owner tells a PM at our company about the project. Usual project kickoff stuff happens where the PM organizes a team and schedules a meeting with the client, etc.

- PM sends a meeting invite to a dev (me), a designer, and a QA, to meet at the client's office for the meeting.

- The owner of the client company does a similar thing, and at the meeting is 3-4 employees who know a lot about their business and the needs of this project. We talk for 2-3 hours and have a pretty good idea of what they need.

(details: The company operates a fleet of temperature sensors. They currently subscribe to a service that alerts them when a thermometer reports values too high or low. They don't like the software and don't want to keep paying for it, and want us to build them a replacement. Basically to collect a bunch of data from devices in the field, parse and store, send sms/email based on rules configured on a web app, and also have some really basic reports viewable)

- The team (4 people, including the PM) play agile games for a few hours, coming up with narratives and points.

- I get to work. Get access to the data, find a japanese manual online for the devices that describes the format of the data, set up a web app, database, user management, data download/parsing, a polling and alerting service. Lots of parts unfinished, but it's technically functional. Less than one week has passed (and my time is split across multiple projects).

- Project is put on emergency hold. Client found out how many hours we had spent, and was pissed. Apparently the person writing the check was told by our owner that it would be like 10-20 hours of work. That was never communicated to the employees at either company. The requirements gathering meeting exhausted the budget all by itself, unknown to everybody present.

- The PM is fired.

- The owner schedules a 1-on-1 meeting with me, where he spends 40 minutes describing the concept of database tables and rows. His thinking is that if I had only known how to store things in a database, the project wouldn't have taken me so long. Fortunately he gets a phone call and abruptly leaves.

- The client was apparently paying $20 a month for their monitoring software.

thundergolfer• 4 years ago

Look at Parag’s work history. He’s been coding recently enough. “Decades” is totally wrong.

Xenoamorphous• 4 years ago

Parag Agrawal joined Twitter a mere 11 years ago as a software engineer. He went from that to first CTO then CEO in a few years, at a big tech company. I have no doubt he has deep technical skills.

dzhiurgis• 4 years ago

So you’re saying Musk is worst executive, no matter his track record?

fileeditview• 4 years ago

[...] I won't let this fail and will do whatever it takes. It's too critical to humanity.

It's really hard for me to not be disgusted by these people thinking that a web platform whose main purpose are shitstorms is critical to humanity.

This is so absurd.. it could be a Monty Python script.

AlmostAnyone2• 4 years ago

On this website you have loads of people claiming that Twitter is an utility and should be regulated and even funded from taxes instead of running as for-profit company... I don't agree with this, but I think it's not so clear cut to be disgusted - many intelligent people think so as well...

thunkshift1• 4 years ago

Lets be honest, Can you go a month without twitter and be okay? Well then its not critical

rurban• 4 years ago

This confirms that Jack Dorsey will be back on top

throw__2sdfw• 4 years ago

I hope he does not. Jack Dorsey endorses decentralization, I don't believe Elon would. Jack is best left out to pursue his own products which will be more decentralized.

Elon Musk Texts Parag Agrawal

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