This article is written by James Hayton, a professor at a business school focused on “innovation” and “entrepreneurship”, and who received funding from the Nuffield Foundation, founded by William Morris, one of the largest financiers of the British fascist movement.
Just to be clear about the ideological commitments of the author and his financiers. I would suggest taking this article with a lot of skepticism.
I mean, he knows how to gut things he doesn’t think are important.
That’s not efficiency, that’s just doing less stuff. Efficiency is when you do the same stuff but with lower cost and the same outcomes. That’s not what musk does.
Do you have any examples or references of this?
like that time Elon Musk removed all the LiDAR sensors from Tesla vehicles that allowed them to be driven safely on auto-pilot?
You are capable of googling and finding Elon Musk’s history of cost-cutting, he guts products - Twitter is another great example
See “firing everyone at Twitter” then realizing the people he fired were responsible for, you know, actually running Twitter.
His approach was essentially “If I don’t know what you do, you’re fired.” Failing to realize the flaw in “not knowing what someone does” is between his own two ears.
A better question would be do you have any examples of him actually creating efficiencies? I don’t mean this in a condescending way but he did do a great job with Tesla but basically no where else. Every time he goes out of his wheelhouse it seems to end in disaster? Honestly I don’t follow him but it’s impossible not to hear about him. So can you elaborate on what his successes were and how’d that translate into making the government more efficient?
As I said in other comment, he lowered Twitter expanses without actually lowering the quality of service quality (I don’t know if he lowered moderation for costs or personal control) .
I would preferred he do the costs minimizing measures more slowly, but I don’t think anyone can criticize the efficiency there.
And all of that while not knowing anything about how social media companies work or having previous experience.
I am saying all this as a person who use Mastodon and BlueSky instead of Twitter.
Most people who left Twitter left it because of Elon ego rather than the way he manages the company internally.
I think a lot of people would disagree with you about X. Objectively he bought the company for $44B and now it’s worth $9B that’s a huge loss. Most people attribute the decline to his “efficiency” measures. Basically losing all the good talent in his company causing a significant decline in users ( because of quality of service). His running of Twitter I think would be a better example of a failure.
That aside hypothetically even if X was doing well - How would the strategy / approach he used in a public company be good for government. These are two very different places?
Wow, that was an incredibly out of touch and frustrating thing to read. The author has no idea what they’re talking about.
in a highly polarised US political landscape, the anguish about his governmental role may be little more than a knee-jerk reaction from the millions of people whose side he did not choose.
No, it’s a reaction to genuinely absurd proposals for how to save money. For example, if they were able to successfully fire every single federal employee, it would save the government just over $100 billion. That money goes to pay the salaries of around 1.5 million federal employees. That’s nothing compared to the entire military budget, for example. So, even accomplishing their goal of firing as many civil servants as possible would save very little money in the scheme of things. All it would accomplish is ruining many basic services that people rely on every day to live a relatively safe and healthy life.
But what this article most glaringly ignores is that this Government Efficiency talk is disingenuous from the start. It’s not about efficiency, it’s about gutting as much of the government as possible so it breaks. That’s what they want, and they’ve been quite open about it.
That’s also now 1.5 million people out of work and not “contributing” to the economy, not spending money or generating tax revenue.
But any step past “step 1” is too far for Elmo to think about.
Elon slashed twitters’ expenditures too. That lowered the service/experience. Our social contract doesn’t need the same.
I hate Elon Twitter actions, but Elon actually cut a lot of their costs without any actual significant losses of quality.
I don’t know what exactly is Elon stand on spending on moderation on the platform(there is a lot of pirated content there). I really don’t know if he removed moderation to have a better control and more freedom to do what he want or he did it to only cut costs.
In all the cases, you got my point.
Just because I hate him, doesn’t mean I should criticize everything he ever did in life.
It’s ok to have a balanced view on people you love or hate.
You are in no way a serious person.
Your arguments here sure sound like you are a very serious and thoughtful person.👍🏻
Relevant username
Good point.
Twitter lost most of its value and revenue though, as a company it lost significant amounts of quality.
He cost cut dual factor authentication because he doesn’t understand the need for it, then made it premium only? Will that help with the bot problem Mr. Musk?
Isn’t the Department of Government Efficiency going to have 2 heads? Doesn’t sound very efficient to me.
It is also redundant in and of itself, given that the GAO already exists.
But I guess you can’t expect an illegal immigrant from Africa to be familiar with the US federal government.
🤣 OMG! How did I forget about the GAO! That is painfully hilarious.
LMAO
Honestly I think it’s just a make-work job Trump gave them in his transactional sort of way. I think he dislikes Musk on a personal level (I have no evidence, I just presume that they have clashing egos and personalities.) I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a public falling out in which Musk gets mad that he isn’t important enough in the admin and badmouths Trump.
It’s up to 3 heads, Majorie Titan Green has joined the crew of people Trump wanted to pay back but keep a distance from.
I worked at twitter when Musk acquired it. He asked everyone to print out their code. Its one of the stupidest things I have heard anyone say at work, ever. My code would be a stack of paper taller than me, mostly white space or generated code. No one would ever read such a thing, or be able to look through it. Its pathologically stupid. He’s just a rich idiot who people work around, not a leader of any sort. Everything at Twitter is broken now. Thats what he will do to ythe government too.
Making savings ≠ increase efficiency
And monkeys might fly out of my butt.
Removed by mod
Hahahahahhahahahhahahahaha… deep breath hahahahahshahahahahahaaaah!!!
Hey guys, turns out you’ll have lots of money if you stop paying pesky things like “employees” and “debt obligations”!
He’s only the richest man in the world because of government contracts, not because he’s a brilliant or a champion of efficiency.
