Call it a brown paper bag, convenience store hold-up style, if you want. When Jerry is adamant about staying just a few weeks ago, and suddenly he changes his mind, something convincing came his way. Convince = Incentive at his level.

Both have claimed they are engineers without receiving degrees in the field. Steve Jobs discovered marijuana and LSD as a teenager, and Elon Musk named his Dragon spaceship after the tune, "Puff the Magic Dragon" (only because people concluded he was smoking it while coming up with such far-out ideas about space).

Could the "reality distortion field" be an effect of nature's best-smelling herbs? Do either of them have a California medical marijuana card? Have you ever thought of replacing every *i*product with *high*product?

HighPod, HighBook, HighSight, HighPhone.

Yeah—that's my question. I worked at a few dotcoms in SF before the fall, and 800 employees would've been ... overload. Do 400 of them get coffee for the other 400?

Google needs to Google what year it is.

I get tired just reading about the engagement ads — I can't imagine users actually doing it, especially facebook users.

Facebook should take a page from every nightclub in America — free for girls, and then charge guys to send them messages and post on their walls. That seems easier.

It could be a wise move. If you invest $500k in exotic furniture, it will probably have a liquidation value of $200k when this company of his goes belly up in 24 months. Likewise, that $500k sitting in the company's bank accounts would be worth $0 in 24 months. And if he invested it in the stock market it would probably be worth $150k in 24 months. The way I look at it, this was a very savvy move on the CEO's part. Bravo!

Sorry, but Prop 8 isn't something worth protesting. A state constitutional amendment can't be overturned by a state court. The only legal action left is claiming that it's an equal protection violation, but the Supreme Court would probably say that it isn't because equal protection applies to people, not rights; the state is providing the right to marry to almost everyone, even gays, provided they marry someone of the opposite sex. No one said there has to be love, and there are plenty of loveless marriages out there.

Did protesting 209 do anything? Tell them to be useful and start a petition to repeal the amendment.

The Supreme Court would probably uphold Prop 8, saying that the state is treating everyone equally unfair. A great example of what equal protection stops is the 2000 Florida recount (Bush v. Gore). The Court (7 justices) said that since different standards were being used in the recount, it was unconstitutional. With Prop 8, the standards, so far, have been applied fairly. What the equality camp doesn't mention is that gays can get married.

"...nor shall any State...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

If it said "couple," Prop 8 would be unconstitutional because it treats couples differently, but it says person.

Now that I think about it, is a way that could lead to overturning Prop 8 through equal protection because it denies marriage to legal persons and the intersexed.

interesting analysis but i would also argue though that much of this is simply that members of internet's "C" team (AKA the people who have been running MSN) are jumping to opportunities created by the departure from Yahoo of the internet's "B" team (AKA Yahoo employees circa late 2008). left on the sidelines in dulles: the internet "D" team.

He's not even a real person anymore. He's the "consensus" version of himself as fabricated by Wikipediots.

You're all missing the point: take the job and then write a book in 18 months - call it the Web 2.0 version of "The Devil Wears Prada."

he problem is Elon's approach to innovation. Innovation means looking carefully at where preceeding approaches have failed, and trying to improve on them. It usually doesn't mean pretending that the same rules don't apply to you (although, in the lone case of PayPal, they didn't, because of the internet).

I think it's a case of people assuming that intelligence can replace wisdom. In the end, experience does matter; history repeats itself; rules can be carefully changed only if you knew what they were to start out with.

I used to get a dozen specialty publications which I directed to work where they (mostly unread) filled a corner of my office until I'd shovel them into a dumpster we'd roll around for just such trash.

With transitions to the web, I'm fairly certain that more articles are getting read (in sum total) than ever before, and this should (and to some extent has) translate into more targeted advertising than has ever been possible.

I hope someone has calculated the number of trees not being cut down due to this change, and while it has obviousy been disruptive to some people I can't help but think it is for the better in the long run.

Meanwhile, purely online media is still looking for the magic formula, combining authoritativeness (my spell checker is satisfied that that is indeed a word), reader interaction/feedback, ease of use and other factors that may not be well understood at all at this point (short/memorable URLs, etc. come to mind).

To my way of thinking, there should have been revolutionary changes to AOL/TW print publications at the time of that merger. The two parts of the company should have been rendered indistinguishable by now.

If they don't change, they may soon be indistinguishable in their absence.

Good. Cut down on those damn kitchen hours so those Google bastards don't clog the elevators ALL DAY every day going between the eighth floor (where the lunchroom is) to their offices on 4, 6, and 10.

You can't get out of this damn building some days!

Owen, I'll take a different approach to the "premium service" concept: People that use Twitter now, or have heard of Twitter, expect it to be free. As soon as Twitter starts to charge business customers for their service, they'll simply stop using Twitter because the current mindset is that it should be, and obviously can be, free.

Twitter, from its onset, should have created a tiered pricing model for various account types; this would have eliminated the current user expectations that it is a free service.

When Brezhnev took over as Soviet chairman, he found two letters in his desk from his predecessor, along with a note to open them only in times of emergency when he didn't have an excuse.

Brezhnev got into trouble, and opened the first one. It said "Blame everything on me."

When Brezhnev got into trouble the second time, he opened the second letter, and it said "Sit down, and write two letters..."

First, they came for the daycare. And I didn't speak up, because I didn't use daycare.

And then they came for the cafe workers. And I didn't speak up, because I didn't eat at that cafe.

And then they came for the contractors. And I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a contractor.

And then they came for me...

well, at least she admits to it; there is very little "original thought" out there, from academia to business — its all on the shoulder of giants.

I think this also goes to show how an idea can hit a market over and over, but until that market "ecosystem" is ready to grow that idea into a hit, well, you are pounding sand. There were quite a few different variations of social networks way before facebook, zuckerburg just hit the lotto on timing.

theres a lot of smart people out there in the tech world, who work hard and have good strategies —- but just like in life, sometimes the difference is a coin toss.

give her credit for seeing the upside; she kept attacking that niche until it hit.

I wonder if he and Michael Arrington taught "how to fire half your staff" at TechCrunch 50 this year?