Quantity of work cannot make up for bad quality

Another amusing insider look into Elon’s disastrous management of Twitter, which is driectly harming his exploding car business:

Musk appears to be struggling to grasp Twitter’s business, the people said, and he demands a stance from his employees that stifles discussion of problems. “He doesn’t see from the zoom-out view at all,” one of the people close to Musk and his team said, describing him as “uncovering and solving and programming all night.”

He has been holed up in a 10th-floor conference areawith a staging room for visitors — where they often remain for more than an hour before being called in. They are instructed not to speak until Musk does. And when they do finally meet with him, he’s sometimes watching YouTube videos.

Many staffers have quickly learned they can’t rely on the erratic and unpredictable Musk, even as he makes assurances about the various facets of the company they have raised as concerns.

[…]

Instead of focusing on plans to make the site a competitor to YouTube with video and rolling out other new features that will earn revenue, he instead got sucked into the culture wars, the people said.

That took the form of the Twitter Files, an examination by some journalists of many of the company’s actions before Musk’s arrival, such as the blocking of a New York Post story that dug into the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the ban on former president Donald Trump.

Musk chose Bari Weiss, a former New York Times columnist, as one of the writers invited inside the company to go through documents.

“Please give Bari full access to everything at Twitter,” Musk wrote to a subordinate in a Signal message viewed by The Washington Post. “No limits at all.”

That was concerning to many inside Twitter — particularly those familiar with the 2011 FTC settlement after hacks of high-profile accounts, including that of then-President Barack Obama. Staffers responsible for her onboarding pushed back and refused to grant Weiss the full access Musk had requested, believingit would violate the settlement.

One former employee described that step as “super unprecedented” and “highly inappropriate,” saying Twitter would never have granted that level of access to an outside party who might suddenly be able to read direct messages, for example.

The pushback, however, was not taken as seriously at senior levels.

Seeing Musk devote long hours to put together plans to violate the privacy of his users and employees so some hand-picked sycophants can churn out culture war Twitter threads that are getting no traction because nothing in them is remotely interesting to anyone but a few already-converted cranks reminds me of nothing so much as this:

During his years with the Dolphins, Gase lived across the street from Loggains. Sometimes, Loggains would be jostled awake after midnight by his wife, Beth. “Adam’s at the door,” she would say.

Dolphins wide receiver Kenny Stills told Gase to stop texting him post-midnight because he kept waking him up.

“You would get these texts from him until 4 in the morning on a regular basis,” says Tannenbaum, now an ESPN analyst. “I don’t think he sleeps a lot.”

Fueled by five or six 20-ounce cups a day from the Kuerig coffee maker that is an arm’s length from his desk, and maybe a Red Bull here or there, Gase has energy like a power plant. And it doesn’t wane in the wee hours.

There is no window in his office to make him aware of the black of the night or the first light of day.

His wife, Jennifer, says he typically gets home at 2 a.m. and goes back to work at 6.  When she travels with him to road games, she gets a separate room because he’s up most of the night watching tape.

Working long days to facilitate the TWITTER FILES is like working 21-hour days to make extra sure your QBs know to throw the ball three yards on 3rd-and-9.