Disappointed in Scott Galloway

I’m a fan of Scott Galloway. I’ve been following him since a few years before the pandemic. He’s super smart, he’s entertaining, and best of all he’s self-aware and vulnerable while doing so. 

But lately I’ve been getting a bad vibe. It’s been building up actually, over several months, but his analysis of the whole Elon Musk and Twitter thing has bothered me a lot. He’s basically ranting two things: 1) there’s no way he could actually buy Twitter, and 2) there’s no way he could be trying to do something good in attempting to do so.

I don’t know much about the financials of buying multi-billion-dollar companies, so I leave that kind of analysis to people like Scott. It appears that, just like with Tesla stock, he was wrong. But much worse in my account was him being wrong about motivation. If you watch what Elon has actually said about why he might want to buy Twitter, and you actually listen to his answers, one thing becomes clear. He cares about the quality of conversation in the world.

That’s it. That’s the whole play. He said he doesn’t care about the economics of it, and he said he isn’t exactly sure what to do, but he wants to get involved to help. This is coming from someone who single-handedly made electric cars mainstream, who changed space exploration, and who’s now looking to revolutionize terrestrial travel by using underground tunnels.

Is Elon sometimes an asshole? Or a troll? Sure. And can he be wrong? Of course. But Scott seems to be making the mistake of assuming bad faith when the evidence is there to realize the opposite. And that on top of his other massive analysis mistakes is starting to make me question his judgment.

I’m fine with Scott being wrong. And even being wrong a lot. As long as he’s mostly right. And as long as he’s almost always right about the important things. And I consider the impugning of someone’s character and intentions to be one of those important things.

Scott. You’re awesome. Please clean this up.