Is Elon Musk the greatest visionary or the greatest snake oil salesman of our age?
- Thread starter tim
- Start date
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
I hope the banks that lent him the money are going to lose most of it. I never understood why they lent to him when it was clearly overvalued, but the more the consequences unfold the more I hope they really suffer for it.
ska invita
back on the other side
tbf the everything app plan has been floating around for a long time, and was sited as a reason he bought twitter
Yeah I think it was part of a grander vision to make crypto happen via a Wechat style everything app including digital payments.
belboid
Exasperated, not angry.
No thanks. Also, we don't need WeChat, the vast majority of people who might consider such a Do Everything app no longer need one. Apple & Android phones already have that aspect built into them, the p[hone itself is the DoEverything app. There is no need for a specific app anymore. Maybe when storage space was a big issue for phones, but it isn't any more. And thats even before asking whether you'd want all that info in the hands of someone like Musk.
He's too late, too dodgy and probably not competent enough either.
bimble
floofy
This is the thing, I mean it’s not surprising or inherently bound to fail, the idea of an ‘everything app’ that billions of people will use to order pizza post catpics and take out a loan or whatever but if you have those sort of megalomaniacal ambitions you can’t also spend your life as the very public face of said app shitposting a load of fringe nazi-adjacent memes all day long, you have to choose, and he doesn’t seem to realise that he’s chosen the latter.
Cid
Proper break this time
WeChat critics you're all very big and clever, but I'm not arguing it's a good idea, it just exists and works and would at least have a chance of being a viable model here. With more barriers to uptake, but people will swallow a lot for convenience (and it does have more functionality than apple pay etc). It's honestly a very good app, it's just that comes with er... issues. Issues which I don't think are insurmountable (though probably Apple etc are on a more regionally sensible tack toward integrating payments), but which sure as fuck are insurmountable if you go about showing yourself to be significantly less trustworthy than, I dunno, actual Tencent.
Lurdan
old wave
This clip was getting a lot of play on Sunday as the branding was being X-changed. Initially it was being posted by a couple of what look like crypto shills. I've no idea when the interview that it's taken from took place. I suspect not recently. However it illustrates 'the uh, vision thing' in play.
View attachment IfXDoneRight.mp4
Transcript:
Please, please Elong, take all my money.
View attachment IfXDoneRight.mp4
Transcript:
Please, please Elong, take all my money.
Artaxerxes
Look out, he's got a gnu!
I don’t see Bezos shit positing on Amazon reviews for example
The world might be a better place if he did
a_chap
When the world came apart, where were you?
This clip was getting a lot of play on Sunday as the branding was being X-changed. Initially it was being posted by a couple of what look like crypto shills. I've no idea when the interview that it's taken from took place. I suspect not recently. However it illustrates 'the uh, vision thing' in play.
View attachment 384644
Transcript:
Please, please Elong, take all my money.
Twitter, "half of the global financial system".
What a fucking idiot.
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
Apparently he’s on the ket:
Ah, attempts to be a bank by people that have no understanding of banks, have never been involved with banking operations, risk, compliance or any other banking area.This clip was getting a lot of play on Sunday as the branding was being X-changed. Initially it was being posted by a couple of what look like crypto shills. I've no idea when the interview that it's taken from took place. I suspect not recently. However it illustrates 'the uh, vision thing' in play.
Transcript:
Please, please Elong, take all my money.
Things always look they should be easy when you conveniently ignore all the complications.
The reason why banking looks “inefficient” is because those inefficiencies are there to protect the consumer as well as prevent things like money laundering. Banks have to comply with regulations around loads of things to this end. For example:
- operational resilience (like, how do you make sure that consumers’ transactions and accounts are protected even if software fails or a third party that the system relies on goes bankrupt)
- conduct (making sure that consumers’ lack of knowledge about complex financial products doesn’t cause them to be taken advantage of)
- capital and liquidity (mitigating damage from bank runs or contagion from elsewhere in the market)
- risk management (making sure they are identifying and monitoring emerging risks)
- communications (making sure they aren’t misleading and are clear)
You can’t be a bank or anything that looks vaguely like a bank without complying with these regulations and being licensed accordingly.
Oh, and did I mention that the regulations vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction? So you’re going to have to have that compliance and the corporate governance that ensure it everywhere you want to be a bank.
TLDR: what Elon wants isn’t possible even in the medium term in the US, Europe, UK etc unless he also buys a bank that is already licensed in those jurisdictions (who will then prevent him from doing a lot of the things he thinks he wants to do).
Post of the day
Cid
Proper break this time
To be fair I'll take that that would probably prevent actual wechat. You probably could manage something wechat-lite that still had significant 'benefits' over existing systems but relied on existing payment methods. Uber+ if you will. But it would be a hell of a task. And still relies on trust and consistency. And presumably there's a reason companies like uber haven't integrated food and driving into the same app.
Artaxerxes
Look out, he's got a gnu!
spitfire
Walty McWaltface
Revolut being a good example of how difficult it is being a "distruptor" in the banking game. (More of a question than a statement.)
This is how many licences PayPal has to have just to operate in the US:
PayPal State Licenses | PayPal US
View the different State licenses that PayPal has in multiple US jurisdictions. Find out more about PayPal`s licensing here.
www.paypal.com
What’s that — getting on for 100? And all those licenses require compliance. That’s what you need if you even just want to be a payment mechanism.
If he doesn’t want to even be a payment mechanism then what exactly is it he is talking about offering here? Just an aggregator that uses ApplePay or PayPal to do the actual payments? That hardly sounds like the ambition to be half the world’s financial database.
Many have tried and all have failed. The thing they want to “disrupt” is almost inevitably all the stuff that regulators have gradually added over the years to prevent repeats of historic failures.
Monkeygrinder's Organ
Dodgy geezer swilling vapid lager
This clip was getting a lot of play on Sunday as the branding was being X-changed. Initially it was being posted by a couple of what look like crypto shills. I've no idea when the interview that it's taken from took place. I suspect not recently. However it illustrates 'the uh, vision thing' in play.
View attachment 384644
Transcript:
Please, please Elong, take all my money.
Massively overstating the supposed potential of whatever his latest thing is is largely how he's made his money isn't it. All those overinflated valuations aren't based on any current figures. So it's not surprising to see him doing it here.
This is correct, and also why Zuckerberg now looks good in comparison.
Nobody knows exactly what Zuckerberg's politics are - you can guess that he is probably broadly liberal on social issues, and maybe some kind of libertarian economically. But it's just inferring based on the demographics he belongs to and we don't actually know. His blank public persona is, when you think about, probably a key part in Facebook's success. If from day one he was posting edgy divisive memes all day I doubt Facebook would have succeeded.
There's a few reasons it works in China though; the monopoly it has has been helped along by the entire regulatory system in China and by the Party in general, who have protected it from competition and boosted it with state support. Both for creating a kind of national champion who can compete with Amazon, Facebook, Google etc and also as a useful tool for surveillance. X is not going to have these advantages. Elon Musk is an idiot who doesn't understand how China works, but they butter him up to attract his investment and steal his Tesla trade secrets so he is blinded by his own narcissism.
Secondly, Wechat pay took off because Visa and Mastercard are restricted in China and very few places accepted card payments, mostly hotels and foreign owned companies like Walmart, and it was a faff where you had to sign your signature. Mobile payments have never taken off abroad to the same extent as in China it was essentially the only alternative to cash; but outside China contactless card payments are actually more convenient than phone payments, as a card doesn't run out of battery and you don't need to faff around unlocking your phone and opening up an app.
I think Elon is also used to being able to just do what he wants with minimal resistance, because tech is an area that disrupters can do things in before laws catch up, by which time the surveillance capital has already been accrued (eg Google and their mapping). However, finance regulators are a very different type of beast. If you want to do anything financial, you’re by default in their playground. And if you want to play in their playground, you’re going to have to prove to them why what you’re doing fits in with their preconceived notions of how it should work. You can criticise that for not actually being flexible or dynamic enough to cope with new ideas, but its advantage is that it builds 300 years of experience of problems into its ever-expanding universe of rules that you have to follow. It’s not optional, there’s no “break it first and then clean it up” allowed. If you can’t show exactly how you meet every rule, you don’t get the licence and you can’t do business at all.
Cid
Proper break this time
This is how many licences PayPal has to have just to operate in the US:
PayPal State Licenses | PayPal US
View the different State licenses that PayPal has in multiple US jurisdictions. Find out more about PayPal`s licensing here.
What’s that — getting on for 100? And all those licenses require compliance. That’s what you need if you even just want to be a payment mechanism.
If he doesn’t want to even be a payment mechanism then what exactly is it he is talking about offering here? Just an aggregator that uses ApplePay or PayPal to do the actual payments? That hardly sounds like the ambition to be half the world’s financial database.
I mean, without going into too much detail on this tangent, wechat essentially uses a bunch of sub-apps and official pages to allow users to arrange a wide range of different services within the same framework. In essence, yeah, it's an aggregator with an attached payment facility. But that does have a lot of power... It's trivial for an organisation to develop a page that works with wechat, certainly one fuck of a lot easier than developing a full app. You can buy any transport ticket, entertainment ticket, pay bills, book appointments etc within a few pages. It is very, very convenient. And yes China has regionally specific utility companies etc. Of course that would be exponentially harder when you're dealing with a bunch of different jurisdictions with different regulations... maybe not impossible though... In essence it is just a very streamlined app environment. So drawing analogies (legally I mean) would probably get you part of the way there. But yeah, I am mostly guessing here and imagine any remotely coherent approach would at minimum start with very expensive legal fees and several years of research.
The general point was more that, even if it is possible, Musk has totally fucked the very fundamental thing you would need for it to work - a broad user base and a lot of trust.
Yossarian
⏭️
Some interesting background here on Musk's late 90s/early00s obsession with turning X.com into a "financial superstore"
The writer concludes:
I think it's a TERRIBLE idea. The world's moved on. He's doing the tech equivalent of drunk-DMing his highschool girlfriend to tell her she's still hot. But you can see the origins now. He thinks this is the genius idea that got away. And that this time nobody can coup him.
The writer concludes:
I think it's a TERRIBLE idea. The world's moved on. He's doing the tech equivalent of drunk-DMing his highschool girlfriend to tell her she's still hot. But you can see the origins now. He thinks this is the genius idea that got away. And that this time nobody can coup him.
Monkeygrinder's Organ
Dodgy geezer swilling vapid lager
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