I've said this before, but it's an approach that you'll see in rocketry. Mistakes are as useful as successes.
Yeah.
When the revamped Blue was announced, and Musk said no one would ever pay $8 just to spam, the risks seemed obvious, and then they happened. Could easily be foreseen. I point this out to highlight that being willing to make mistakes doesn't have to mean making obvious blunders.
I also know from personal experience what happens when a big corporation tries to run like a startup, exactly what Musk is doing. In my experience, it doesn't work. Maybe Musk will have more success. He seems smarter and harder working than the leadership where I was.
And yet, all that said...
For some reason, in our culture, we've come to hold risk aversion as a sacred value. "Safetyism" as it's been called. Related to this (though I don't know exactly how) is that people who have never risked anything in their lives can point to and mock the failures of people who at least tried.
I say this as someone who has a lot of problems with risk aversion - Being willing to fail is the only way you can succeed. A lack of failure might feel good in the short term, but in the long term the failures will seem small and the lack of successes will loom large.
I feel like a lot of people watching Musks's Twitter tenure are thinking "I of course would hold meetings and consult with experts to make the best decisions." That's what the old Twitter did. It was a low enough value company that a single billionare could buy it. The company was technologically stagnant.
The "move fast and break things" mentality of the 00s/10s tech boom has been somewhat rightfully criticized, but in the end, those people built some of the most prosperous and powerful companies in America. The "adults" who took over afterwards turned the big tech cos into behemoths being punished by recession.
Musk might have bitten off more than he can chew, but how many people were even willing to take the bite?