These reactionary posts fail to do rational calculations. Letting go half of the staff exactly enabled $1B in debt servicing. Even though it might look reckless, it is clear that much of these staff wasn’t on critical path for running day to day operations. So, Twitter will keep running smoothly on infrastructure side. There is NO viable competition that exists for Twitter in same format. People creating Mastodon accounts quickly find out that it is unworkable at scale. I would expect $8/mo subscription getting picked up by most upper class/professionals as they open up more features to get your posts noticed. Currently, Twitter is mainly a website for top 1% to disseminate their message and it will slowly transform into top 5% decimate their message. Eventually this is win-win and erase out $4M/day losses. The thing I worry about is generating returns on Saudi+VC+bank investments which seems not much as user base and ad revenue have failed to grow despite efforts by multiple CEOs. There was a joke that it might be easier to make peace in Middle East than significantly grow Twitter profits. If Musk can pull that off, he will be business legend. Most likely he won’t but he can take it back to public when market swings high in 2-3 years where he can show turnaround from loss to little bit of profits and generate respectable returns for his investors through our 401k funded public markets.
> There is NO viable competition that exists for Twitter in same format.
This doesn't necessarily matter. From the blog post:
> I keep wondering about “what is going to replace Twitter”, but I am increasingly of the belief that this is the wrong question, that no single thing is going to replace Twitter. That is, Twitter as an idea — a single social platform catering to all demographics and uses — will become like the evening nightly news or the morning newspaper: a relic from a bygone era.
Twitter is a way to spend time. People can leave Twitter and spend their time in other ways, without joining a service like Twitter. The world existed before Twitter existed, and the world will continue to exist after Twitter doesn't.
> Even though it might look reckless, it is clear that much of these staff wasn’t on critical path for running day to day operations. So, Twitter will keep running smoothly on infrastructure side
Is it clear though? There is a lot more to running Twitter than just keeping the servers online. If the site turns into a cesspool and becomes unpleasant to be on, users will flee in droves.
Also it's been only a few days since the layoffs. If you laid off half the doctors/residents in a busy hospital, patients may not start dropping like flies right away. That doesn't mean the hospital is able to function effectively. It takes time for technical issues to develop and trigger problems in the rest of the system.
Twitter has lot of algorithmic control already and it has worked pretty good for more than decade. This is not to say more staffing wouldn’t be useful and improve experience but I don’t think Twitter is in sudden risk of turning into cesspool any more than it was 5 years ago. People will always point to XYZ examples but you need to look at big picture.
> "Currently, Twitter is mainly a website for top 1% to disseminate their message and it will slowly transform into top 5% decimate their message."
I realise that your use of decimate is likely an autocorrect typo, but as it stands, it's actually a rather witty description of what occurs on social media right now. The top 5% decimates what the 1% disseminates.
> Letting go half of the staff exactly enabled $1B in debt servicing
$1.3 Billion debt service (assuming 10% CCC Bonds locked into April 2022 on $13 Billion in debt)
Assuming 3500 staff were let go, do you really think each staff member was costing the company $370,000 / year ? I don't think so. I'd estimate the costs-per-head to be under $200,000 for the typical staff member (sure, maybe some set of senior programmers are paid $250,000 with + $100,000 in benefits, but there's not _THAT_ many senior level staff. And the seniors are exactly the people you don't want to be firing)
Even then, that's just the debt issue. Rumor is that Twitter lost $700-million/year or so in ad revenue at its latest advertising conference.
My current estimate to Twitter's yearly losses is _STILL_ on the order of $1100+ Million or so, even with all the staff reductions. (Originally $2+ Billion or so losses/year, but maybe 900-million/year saved from this firing spree)
> Rumor is that Twitter lost $700-million/year or so in ad revenue at its latest advertising conference.
And having lost its CRO, who walked out on Thursday, Musk tried to repair the damage himself on a conference call with major advertisers, who started adjusting their spending down while on the call. Twitter's ad revenue for 2023 will be a smoking crater.
Isn't it premature to call Twitter's death? Is there any data to show it's actually going to be immediately replaced by anything else?
I have no doubt that Musk is doing damage, but the hypothesis is: change can happen really fast, therefore Twitter will immediately fail, which isn't a self evident truth.
It already has changed. The Twitter from two weeks ago is gone and replaced with… something. We don’t know what that currently means, but it is different.
The hypothesis wasn’t that Twitter will immediately fail. It was that it is currently on that path. And that changes happen gradually, but can be profound. (Or as the trope about bankruptcy goes: it happens gradually and then all at once).
It might not ever “fail” as a company, but it’s on that path. Whether that is less relevance or a bankrupt company, it’s too early to say. All we do know is that it is changing.
> It already has changed. The Twitter from two weeks ago is gone
Is it though? My own experience is that Twitter is exactly the same as it was two weeks ago. The only difference I'm seeing is that a lot of people on Twitter are currently preoccupied with the topic of Twitter.
As far as I can tell it's not really much different than when a lot of people on Twitter have been preoccupied with some other controversy. And in every case, the same discussions of general news and domestic politics go on entirely unaffected.
Twitter has gone from losing -$200 million per year into losing -$2,000 million per year... in just one week. ($1,300 million extra losses from the debt associated with the buyout, $600 million lost in advertising revenue).
Its a serious problem for sure. Its obviously a far more stressful situation for all involved. Perhaps the typical user isn't affected yet, but we're all forward looking. Anyone who can add up revenue / costs / profits can see that Twitter suddenly became in trouble this past week.
It is. We might not see all the ramifications of it in the public sphere yet but it's, definitely, a different company going into a different direction with their product.
Like GP said, what it has become is still for us to find out but the wheel has been set in motion: staff is being laid off, product changes are being introduced, whole departments are left not staffed and it will take weeks to months for all of this to unravel.
It is a different beast, internally, than it was 2 weeks ago. It will keep changing and being molded but that Twitter no longer exists, it's on the path to become something else.
I’m confused how the semantic game of “that Twitter no longer exists” contributes to the discussion. By that same logic, you could say that the Twitter of 2015 didn’t exist in 2020. The only difference is the speed of change.
I can at least say that it is for me. Not because of changes on Twitter but because a lot of the people I am on Twitter for have all the sudden created Mastodon profiles and started posting content there too.
Since they no longer have the same influence as before over how the company operates, the people and groups who lost the power are going all out to weaken Twitter's influence now while it is weak.
I follow a handful of people directly, and my experience hasn't changed.
> Is there any data to show it's actually going to be immediately replaced by anything else?
From the article:
> I keep wondering about “what is going to replace Twitter”, but I am increasingly of the belief that this is the wrong question, that no single thing is going to replace Twitter. That is, Twitter as an idea — a single social platform catering to all demographics and uses — will become like the evening nightly news or the morning newspaper: a relic from a bygone era.
That would be nice. But at some point, someone will both have the resources as well as the luck of being at the right place and a new, possibly more powerful (because they will be more competent than twitter) platform will take over.
Unfortunately, in the meantime some people believe that Mastodon may be filling that void. I don't think it can, but as a long time Fediverse user, I'm worried that people will think that for long enough to change it into something it couldn't be.
Are there Companies threatening to pull Ads from Twitter? Yes, but just like with Facebook, they did eventually came back. Assuming Twitter still has most of its users.
So yes I agree I am not entirely sure why everyone seems to be jumping to conclusion. Just like everyone ( or People on the internet ) thought consumers were abandoning Facebook in 2015, 2016 or 2019.
I never liked the classist undertones associated with the twitter verified badges. In some ways it’s satisfying to see the badge stripped of its meaning and prestige.
That being said the way Musk is going about these changes is damaging to Twitter in the short term. Will be interesting to see if Twitter survives when the dust settles.
> I never liked the classist undertones associated with the twitter verified badges. In some ways it’s satisfying to see the badge stripped of its meaning a prestige.
This seems to be a recurring opinion of Twitter users, but as someone who doesn't use it I thought it was just a way to prove that some slightly public figure is who they say they are and not some imposter? It seems weird to be upset that "Elon Musk " is Elon Musk and not some crypto scammer (maybe a bad example), so I guess I'm missing something.
Yeah, I too don't understand why the earlier system was 'classist'? It seemed like a better way to be sure that someone was who they said they were? The proposed mechanism of paying to get a check-mark seems suspect. I understand paying for extra features, but paying to say "I am who I am" seems like it could get abused and not a good idea. Now only people who think they need to pay for it and think it worthwhile will get it and that seems like classist in a different way.
That's largely the way I've viewed it as well by being exposed to more prominent infosec people than A-list celebrities.
But it's also not enough. You can change your name, photo, bio, to be like someone else, even if you have the checkmark. Users have to also read the handle (unique within the app), but the page styling gives that significantly less emphasis.
Jeph Jacques, author of Questionable Content webcomic and verified Twitter user, has been having fun this week by making a parody of Musks's account. https://twitter.com/jephjacques (currently partially restricted, but you can click through)
"Name + Checkmark" doesn't make a good certificate of authenticity.
That's still how it was for the highest profile users (Trump had the check mark, remember) - but down in the lower-regions it was a status symbol for those who "made it" - and the rumor is that status symbol could be gamed.
Verification had a "notoriety" aspect - I couldn't get verified because I'm a nobody; dang might be able to, Paul Graham for sure.
> In some ways it’s satisfying to see the badge stripped of its meaning and prestige.
The only official "meaning" of the badge was that the user matched the identity of the profile, even though more was read into it both by users and employees. The notion that it will now be possible to "pay to impersonate" is absurd, but I have seen it being spread widely on social media and on television!
> The only official "meaning" of the badge was that the user matched the identity of the profile
That's what they said, but what happened in actual practice is that you had to have a certain level of fame or notoriety to get a blue check. Everyone knows this, it isn't just "reading into it"
> The notion that it will now be possible to "pay to impersonate" is absurd
It is indeed quite obviously absurd, which is why it seems strange that so many people are assuming that this is exactly what is going to occur. It doesn't take much thinking to imagine ways they could allow anyone to get verified while not allowing impersonation. For example—and this is just the first idea that comes to mind—they could require people to consent to their username being locked in return for that checkmark.
Perhaps this shouldn’t have been surprising, but Musk has absolutely no idea what he’s doing, having screwed up the most basic element of the business: he doesn’t even know who the customer is! (It’s, um, the ad buyer, stupid.)
People said the same about Tesla and Space-X too. They said the same about bezos and amazon.
* he reacted to the revenue drop by threatening those that are reducing their spend! (Does it need to be said that menacing customers who choose to buy less from you doesn’t really work in a free economy?)*
Or maybe he is exaggerating the problem for marketing purposes. Twitter is private so it no longer has to report earning. If this was true, he would have no reason to announce it. It is part of his marketing angle.
if the integrity of Twitter goes up, "the top 10% of the left and right equally angry", so will the value of the twitter firehose.
There is so much value in there, no advertiser could afford it. The same goes for the access to people it holds.
When [namecencored] says he wants to turn Twitter in some creepy Chinese everything-app; it implies he knows what troves of value is not capitalised upon right now.
To base the twitters business model primarily on ad buyers is ludicrous.
Even disabling firehose access to people and using the hose themselves for stock trading alone could potentially be a bomb.
So people say Elon doesn't actually 'run' his companies, that he's just lucky. But now people say Elon is running Twitter and he's running it into the ground. The narrative changes based on how people want to justify success or failure. Elon is either the cause or 'had nothing to do with it'
All I can see - laying off tons of people, implementing sweeping changes, cutting non-essential programs, cutting cloud costs, making big financial bets is pretty much the same way he has operated SpaceX and Tesla the past 20 years. All the while people saying landing rockets is a dumb idea, global satellite internet will never work especially with lasers, launching astronauts is harder than you think, and electric cars are impractical and lead to Tesla's bankruptcy.
It's been only a few days, can we not give the guy some time to at least try some things. All these, 'the sky is falling at Twitter' posts are not going to age well. It will probably end up being a good case study in how the media steers the narrative and group think.
1. The people saying Elon doesn't have a heavy hand in his companies and the people saying he is running Twitter with a heavy hand are largely the same people.
2. It's impossible that Elon indeed both does have a heavy hand in Twitter and does not have a heavy hand in most/all of his other companies.
These assumptions are the same flavor of cognitive bias to the one you're accusing others of: That born of a desire to paint a group of perceived opponents in a poor light.
> These assumptions are the same flavor of cognitive bias to the one you're accusing others of: That born of a desire to paint a group of perceived opponents in a poor light.
Not the parent poster, but that post didn't seem to contain the biases you mentioned. You had to make an intellectual leap to find them.
1. They are largely the same people. The mere fact that it is theoretically possible that it is two separate groups doesn't mean we should ignore the obvious fact that it is not.
2. It's possible of course, but almost nobody making either point (usually both) does so with the kind of nuance necessary to make this argument.
1. "People" are neither a monolith nor convenient straw men to be blown down
2. The arguments that he "doesn't run his companies" is referencing the successes, and that he "runs a company into the ground" references failures. These two ways of looking at him are not only not mutually exclusive, they go very well together: "whenever he intervenes he makes it worse, any company that is successful is so because he gets out of the way", or something along those lines.
Whether or not those arguments hold up I neither know nor care about, because this drama is as significant to my life as Amber Heard vs Johnny Depp was. Which is to say: only insofar as it seems to be so goddamn unavoidable when I want to spend my limited time on this earth doing other things.
You didn't finish your argument. It could also be not just "whenever he intervenes he makes it worse, any company that is successful is so because he gets out of the way" — but also "whenever he intervenes he makes things better, any company that is a failure is so because he got of the way". That too is not mutually exclusive.
I found it odd that both the New York Times and The Washington Post had top stories about how terrible things were at Twitter now that Musk took over. A few days is hardly enough time to decide that a new leader has destroyed a company.
If a few days is enough time for a new leader to decide half of the workforce is redundant, then it's enough time for others to decide the leader is an idiot. You can't have it both ways.
But it wasn't a few days. Musk and his team had half a year to analyse the existing company structure and made preparations. Furthermore, it has been admitted that Twitter had layoffs in the order of 25% already planned, but those were placed on hold during the transition period.
More fundamentally, there's something deeply misguided about anyone complaining about layoffs at any corporation which haemorrhages money the way Twitter has for many years. Quite simply, unless Twitter has a path towards financial viability, there would be no point in it having any employees at all.
Musk spent half the year trying to not purchase Twitter. Or is the thinking that he was simultaneously attempting to not own Twitter while devising the management strategy if he did?
Musk spent half the year trying to not purchase Twitter for 44 billion. What happened was that he (unluckily or foolishly, pick your poison) signed a watertight buy agreement just before the wider stock market experienced a crash. He did try to get out of the deal, but that's not the same as saying that owning Twitter is something he no longer wanted.
Twitter's interest burden wasn't this ridiculous as a public company, and they make $1bil/quarter on average (well, they were before Musk ran away advertisers). When you say "money pit" I imagine investors dumping in cash to make up for low revenue, and this hasn't been the case for years.
Musk's purchase, as you may know, increased Twitter's interest burden, so now Twitter is losing $4mil/day.
In the absence of Musk holding the company hostage from April to November, yes, of course Twitter would have to make some cuts like so many others who've had a drop in revenue.
But there's no reason to believe they would have cut the estimated 50-55% that Elon has.
edit: And now there's impact of this decision: of those who didn't get cut, how many will decide this isn't a healthy environment to work in?
Disagreeing with someone's approach or saying you think it will have a terrible outcome is fine. What's weird is seeing major media publications looking at the first few days of a transition period and pronouncing that this is the way Twitter will now be. For instance, this is was the top Washington Post story a day ago[1]: "Advertisers fleeing, workers in fear: Welcome to Elon Musk’s Twitter" with the byline "The company was hailed for its welcoming and relaxed work environment. Elon Musk made that a relic of the past."
I mean, a month ago Musk wasn't even go to buy Twitter. You'd think we'd want to wait at least a few weeks (if not much longer) before deciding that what Musk is attempting to do during the first few days is definitely going to be the way Twitter will be handled going forward.
The Guardian had a live feed of Twitter drama. It's beyond ridiculous and reflects the unhealthy relationship between journalists and Twitter. Compare it to the situation at Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg is calmly destroying his vastly larger and more influential company with almost no media attention.
I agree about the unhealthy relationship, but I think you're understating the media lens on Meta: there's been a running column on their (slow) implosion in the NYT for at least a year now. The recent "legs" affair was the tech news story for a day or two.
Twitter gets disproportionate attention because of the relationship you mentioned, but also because what's happening to it is pretty unprecedented. It stands to reason that it'll be the main topic in tech journalism for the next few weeks, particularly as Musk continues his attention seeking behavior (and journalists continue to feed on it).
I mean, if you lay off half of a company and make the rest work double time, "terrible" is not the most inappropriate adjective for an external observer to use.
So by your definition, a fuckup is when something isn't done absolutely perfectly? Let's be realistic for a moment here; surely it would be WAY more remarkable if a company laid off 3,700 employees and exactly zero mistakes were made.
What level of error would be sufficient to warrant the haphazard descriptor? Two percent? One percent?
A company like Twitter is complex, and it's very likely that some number of people are important in a way which cannot be seen from a top-down view. Hence error correction. It's a good thing. I see it as a healthy sign that Twitter management are identifying and rectifying their mistakes so quickly.
why? it's a major media takeover with a lot of big names/drama invovled same scale as the at&t/warner media deal it's one of the top stories in the WSJ too
This is a description of virtually all behavior visible online today. While it is true that the same poison infects the media, they are actually less affected on average than the general population. Of course, in a well-functioning world, this kind of infection would be near-zero among journalists.
I thought he was famous for being a micromanager, and that the troughs (and peaks) of his companies are commonly attributed to that. At least in my bubble (which is not particularly "pro" Elon) he's never been characterized as "hands off"; only incompetent in ways that don't guarantee failure when you're already worth billions of dollars.
There is often a single point of failure, but never a single point of success.
If SpaceX succeeds it's because everybody came together and pulled their weight in the right direction, Elon included. It takes a lot of people for a company to succeed.
Twitter could initiate a death spiral at the hands of one person, who culls the workforce too aggressively and scares off all the advertisers.
Maybe the narrative changes because it's actually different people you hear these narratives from? At least that sounds like the most likely explanation to me. Of course there will be die-hard Musk enemies, who will use either conflicting explanation as long as it paints him in a bad light, but the rest of the criticism might come from entirely different groups of people, some of which believe he's actively running his companies, some that things just happen without his doing and he lucked out (or in Twitter's case, potentially had some bad luck, but I think it's to early to decide that in any case).
Just from an employee perspective (speculating, I'm not there) I'd imagine that if 50% of your colleagues were dramatically fired, I'd be looking for a job even if I survived this round. How much of the expertise that built the platform will remain in a year?
And hiring is going to be difficult. As a techie in silicon valley, no way I'd consider joining unless they paid way, way above market since I know any job there will be just one Musk tantrum away from evaporating. Too risky.
>>I'd imagine that if 50% of your colleagues were dramatically fired, I'd be looking for a job even if I survived this round.
Another way of looking at this is since so many people left, there is lots of vacuum, and open positions to be taken, and if you can hold on for a while many good things could be headed your way. What will leaving do anyway, you have to work your way up in the new company. It is also not a very great market for job seekers given most companies are or will lay off people inevitably.
>>As a techie in silicon valley, no way I'd consider joining unless they paid way, way above market since I know any job there will be just one Musk tantrum away from evaporating. Too risky.
This is another misnomer, there is lots of tech talent often for way cheaper going around. Not every body needs to reverse binary trees to build react sites. Or even myriad other infrastructure and general programming tasks that 99% of all software development is made up of.
Of all the ways in which somebody could lose their jobs, Musk surely has some of the most logical reasons. I've seen routine lay offs for a lot more flimsy reasons, where some mid level management often does to protect their fiefdoms, or decide to randomly cancel projects their immediate competition in company is working for.
The vast majority of people don’t dislike all those things you say in the second paragraph. What people do dislike is using “free speech” as a stick to selectively encourage the use of racist/sexist language on a platform with a lot of impressionable people. All free speech is arbitrary and his malicious motives are transparent and disgusting in this one case.
I used to be a die hard progressive and campaigned for candidates. Liberals used to have the same basic understanding of American principles, culture and constitution as their counterparts. ACLU was pro-free speech. Die hard progressives were about net neutrality, freedom of expression and against 3 letter agencies. It's the 10-20% left has gone way past the basic rationality and is on the same basic scale as QAnon to me. They can't agree on things like biological facts and everything is racist/sexist, trying to force their ideology by supressing free speech. Total lunacy.
May be your tolerance for normal things have diminished and you find normal speech "offensive".
I haven't found anything sexist/racist on Twitter or elsewhere on places like /r/conservative. It's most likely your definition of racist/sexist that's changed.
I agree, the fall of the ACLU has been particularly disappointing. The former longtime executive director Ira Glasser has done a number of press interviews on how the ACLU has been taken over by 'progressive' ideologues who don't support free speech or other civil liberties.
I was amazed at their intervention in a recent lawsuit where they argued against releasing public records. The ACLU of old would never have done this.
I think this case is also what you are referring to when you mention denial of biological facts? For others reading this comment, here's what the ACLU actually submitted to the court:
> Proposed Intervenors deny the allegation that "it is precisely a combination of anatomy, genitalia, and physical characteristics that differentiate men from women[.]" Proposed Intervenors also deny the allegation that "human beings" are "sexually dimorphic, divided into males and females each with reproductive systems, hormones, and chromosomes that result in significant differences between men[] and women[.]"
What does he have to do for you to decide he's unfit? Does he have to burn down the headquarters trying to light his crack pipe before you agree the sky is falling?
It always takes years to properly evaluate how well a company/manager is performing, and the right course of action at any moment in time is never obvious, not even to the people on the inside making the decisions, let alone outside observers. If the "right thing to do" was obvious, then every sideline observer could just go ahead and start a company doing all the "obvious" things and be wildly successful. Obviously this isn't the case.
I'm content to reserve judgement and see what happens over the long term. Others are completely free to judge based on day-to-day drama, of course. But for their own sake I hope they keep a note of their assessments and predictions now, and check back in a few years to see how well they did.
In a capitalistic world, if someone is so lucky that he could churn out successful companies one after another, then he is an investment genius, his luckiness is a super power belongs to him and him alone, not anyone else, so capital, in forms of both money and talents, will still follow.
Regardless, he is so influential yet controversial it is going to be very difficult to objectively assess his work and impact.
Certainly I won't buy a cent what some media experts said about him at current moment.
I mean obviously with a team of thousands of people, everyone is smart and working hard. But isn't it Elon who is deciding - yes/no I want to put tons of money and people into figuring out landing rockets, yes failures are acceptable, yes let's build a big f'ing ship to go to Mars, yes we're going to release a truck that looks like an oragami DeLorean and give it a crazy name CyberTruck, yes we're going to let you play video games in your car. And now, everyone gets a blue check mark!
You can have the best engineers in the world, but if the person at the top wants them to build a car that looks like Homer Simpson designed it then the company is going to fail. And that's Elon's role - make decisions all day long. Engineers give him options, cost/risk trades, etc.. and he has to make the right decisions that won't lead to bankruptcy. Tens of thousands of jobs on the line if the wrong decision is made.
> And that's Elon's role - make decisions all day long.
The key point is that Elon's decision-making tends to be very close to the coalface. He's often involved in the minutiae of factory operations at Tesla[1] and he is a core member of the rocket engineering team at SpaceX[2].
I actually think he's a genuine one of a kind technologist+businessman and folks are pessimistic about everything. He wins some and loses some. And his wins are bigger than anyone else's.
The weirdest part has been seeing which companies are pulling their ads, as if the people making those decisions have political ties that outweigh simply running their companies for the sake of their products. Lock-step with misleading claims about Twitter content policy, it’s very surreal.
Put yourself into their shoes. Why take a risk with Twitter when there are other options with similar returns but without the drama? There is a non-zero chance that just being associated with Twitter could turn out to be problematic in the coming months.
That's what I am thinking. Recession or not, recent financial policy is going to have many companies taking a hard look at their expenditures. A few redundant staff here, fruitless R&D project there, ad spend, etc.
I saw a post today that Coca Cola pulled their ads but I saw one an hour ago (and took a screenshot as proof). So who knows what the fuck is actually happening
A company like Coca Cola probably plans their ad spend well in advance, and these are likely managed by external agencies. It's one thing to stop planning new advertising campaigns to run on Twitter; it's quite another to reverse course on campaigns already scheduled in.
If you've ever worked at any sufficiently large company, especially where third-party agencies/contractors/analysts are involved, you'd know that "nonsense all around" is in fact the status quo.
Coca Cola would like everyone to know they're pulling their ad spend for all the right reasons, without actually reducing ad spend. They'd love to have it both ways.
My general concern is that these continuing side projects are seriously going to start detracting from his self reported primary missions dealing with spaceflight and human colonization.
As a collective of industries/businesses, Spacex, Starlink, Gigafactories for batteries, and Tesla cars all generally support each other. That's four overwhelmingly large enterprises that any regular founder would build their career around individually. It's incredibly impressive that Musk has built all four into successful businesses.
The random side projects are a distraction.
Twitter is just the largest and most expensive. Boring machines is going nowhere, though I appreciate the comedy in the naming.
Tesla long haul trucks are a natural extension of that ecosystem but should be managed by employees at Tesla.
Neurolink potentially has some major long term foundational changes, but the tech is probably 10 years too early to build a successful company around. (However I think this is potentially Musk's most important future company beyond Spacex.)
But, he is the guy with the success so far, so my little one-man opinions are just that.
My personal priorities are on spaceflight and colonization, and I would like to see him just focusing on that. Despite the progress that Starship is making, everything seems to have slowed down dramatically. There has yet to be a full stack launch. They just moved ship 8 to the retirement pad. There was only one Heavy launch this year when 3 were scheduled.
Regular Falcon 9 flights are happening almost daily, which is quite astounding. Like, really astounding. Starlink is already active and providing high speed service around the world and is a critical part of Ukraine's defense against Russia.
I just want to see more progress being made towards the moon lander, reusable Starship launches, on-orbit refueling, and measurable progress towards Mars expeditions.
>> Neuralink potentially has some major long term foundational changes, but the tech is probably 10 years too early to build a successful company around. (However I think this is potentially Musk's most important future company beyond Spacex.)
No it's not 10 years too early, it's 50 years late to the party - but your conclusion could very well be right regardless.
Non-invasive BCI surpassed everything Neuralink has done so far decades ago, however it's not super relevant since the capabilities of micro electronics skyrocketed; and perhaps indeed beyond SpaceX potential.
If you can't afford BCI for your children, in the future they will be doomed to be blue collar as all those who do will have children with brains supported or adjusted for them to pass the highest levels of education & training within shorter amounts of time thus will rule the world.
The most famous example of things like this already in use today is DARPA / US Snipers doubling some of their test scores using BCI. This is just the beginning.
See the link below for more information.
https://totaltdcs.com/uploads/docs/darpa-operational-neurosc...
I feel like most people are simply coping with the Twitter takeover. People and pundits may have no agency in the matter but they certainly have lots of opinions. You can't will Twitter to fail as much as you might want that to be possible. If Twitter fails it will be because of the company's execution. Not because everyone got all angry and wanted to cancel Musk. He's not cancel-able as he has his own platform now and his success or failure is not within your reach to touch.
Does anyone here happen to have insight into Twitter usage stats? Advertisers will return if the users remain, especially with what's been going on with Meta ads. Sure, some influencers will leave Twitter over principle and never come back, but Facebook and others have survived much more aggressive #delete campaigns.
My sense is that barring some major Twit scandal next Tuesday (mid-term elections in the US), the controversy will blow over. In a few months, Twitter's user growth metrics will start to trend upward. Much like how Facebook survived Cambridge Analytica #delete campaign. There isn't anything ready to replace Twitter in the next few months. All the free publicity it's getting right now is setting the stage for major publicity for every new feature Musk and team rolls out. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't it more likely Musk will actually succeed in the long run given his access to funding, track record and his ultimate goal of fixing the public square? Genuine question.
I also have the feeling that some of the most vocal “I’m leaving Twitter, Twitter is dead” folks are actually quite toxic and negatively influence the platform. Maybe the experience for those who stay will be improved.
If they can fix the bot problem and allow for better long form conversations (even as a paid feature), true engagement will go up and advertisers will return. I run a lot of conversion (not brand) ads on Meta, Google, and Reddit but haven't had predictable success on Twitter in years because of the bots. Large brands will shy away for awhile because of the controversy, but small businesses will advertise on Twitter if the cost per click goes down due to fewer bots.
Musk has a long track record of succeeding against all odds. Even if you think the guy is a scummy or unethical person , he somehow is able to do things that defy what seems possible. Start a space program, start an electric car company, succeed greatly at both.
Very insightful analysis of the current Twitter situation. This was my favorite line:
> having screwed up the most basic element of the business: he doesn’t even know who the customer is!
This knowledge is difficult to obtain. But I agree it is basic and critical. Knowing who both desires the value you can offer and can pay for it is critical to any successful business.
If you are interviewing, learning who the customer is is critical for you to have any chance of assessing the chances of success of the company. If they don't know who it is, ask how they are finding out. (If they are a later stage company and still finding it out, that is a risky situation.)
It's also important to know the answer to ascertain what kind of company is being built. For instance, if the customer is the CIO, that is going to be an entirely different kind of company (in so many ways: marketing, sales team, product emphasis, value of engineering, customer LTV, customer lifecycle, UX, and more) than a company where the customer is an engineering manager or developer.
Pay to be heard, not pay to read. If you want to be heard, you'll need to be pay $8. Blue users will get priority over their tweet ranking compared to non-blue users.
Lot of people would pay I think. It is not the same as Youtube where you are just purely consuming, not participating.
You could buy attention today (promoted tweets, promoted "who to follow", or more shady sites selling followers and likes). Most didn't.
Musk (and yourself) seem to be falling in the age old mistake of thinking they are the user, a thought every decent PM should slap out of him, had he not fired them all, and made the rest scared for their lives.
Not easily. Promoted tweets isn't a subscription and average user doesn't want to dive into their backend Ad platform.
I don't think anyone is failing to see your perspective. I am sharing what I think as objectively as I can present it. You and I are not wrong or right, we will have to see how things will play out. These are proposals.
Musk built SpaceX from the ground up, a company that achieved tremendous things in one of the most difficult and entrenched business domains. He played a big role in Making Tesla what it is today, in another of the most entrenched domains.
Clearly he has done lots of things right.
That makes it so odd how chaotic and inept this takeover appears.
Big layoffs after a takeover will also be chaotic, and a bandaid that needs to be ripped off ASAP. There is really no good way to do it, and mistakes will be made.
BUT Musk managed to attack and undermine Twitters two most valuable assets: advertisers and celebreties.
He claimed advertisers are trying to kill free speech, and threatened them with public shaming. All while sending all the signals that he will change the platform in a way that makes those advertisers very concerned. (less moderation, "free speech", laying off much of the teams ensuring brand safety)
He got in public spats with the second most valuable asset: celebrities. Most users on Twitter are just passive consumers, there to hear directly from notable persons they care about.
The verification system is essential to this - it gives you reasonable trust that an account is actually the person they claim to be.
Maybe a subscription model can make sense, but it should probably be separate from the verification system.
There are only ~400k verified accounts, a drop in the bucket at 8$ a pop. This drama could have been avoided by just grandfathering them in.
On top of that he has tweeted conspiracy theories by odd media, seemed to do important market analysis and price finding via tweeted survey over 2 days, and all in a has just seemed a bit unhinged.
This whole thing is a mess, and I don't get how this can happen. Eg, how can you not realise beforehand how important advertising is for revenue...
Tesla stock is falling, so Musk probably is selling to cover costs - he won't get any msignificant loans with good conditions...
I always assumed this whole takeover was a boon for the right, to get a favourable relationship with future administrations for Tesla and SpaceX.
This may still work out for Musk, but not if Twitter dies too quickly.
There is no immediate competition on the horizon though, so there is time
Yeah, what he has done with SpaceX is incredible. Love him or hate him, but Falcon launch system is the most viable alternative to Russians. Starlink already provides internet in rural areas and is literally battle-tested. I am skeptical about Tesla, particularly because if their self-driving claims, but he scaled it up and the vehicle itself is solid. That is what many who hate him, don’t want to admit. His companies did create some nice tech. Maybe he just burnt out and lost focus.
My priors are 30% Twitter “fails” in either bankruptcy or by losing most of its userbase, 30% Twitter more or less continues - perhaps unable to meet its new interest payments, 30% it’s much more profitable albeit in a very different form.
> he (Musk) doesn’t even know who the customer is! (It’s, um, the ad buyer, stupid.)
Up until now, but ... who wants that really? Ads SUCK. If Ads are the customers, users are the product. I like the idea of turning Twitter into the product.
Why should I listen to a chirp from this guy? He doesn't understand what is happening.
It's weird that somebody thinks mainstream companies refusing to advertise on more controversial but popular properties is a good thing. It tells you those mainstream companies have way too much market power and something should be done to mitigate that, up to and including breaking the mainstream company up. There should be so much competition that few companies would ever choose to ignore a popular property with customers likely to use their product. While this may be an innocuous abuse of market power, or perhaps even an abuse you agree with, companies that are abusing their market power are rarely doing it in just one dimension and one has to wonder just how bad the world is getting screwed in less obvious/ in our face ways.
First of all, that's not what I said. What I said was all of them choosing to miss out on influencing the customers of a popular (and law abiding) property indicates way too much market power, which almost certainly means us consumers are getting screwed on multiple other fronts by these companies.
Second of all, wanting companies to choose ethics over making money is an illogical position because ethics vary greatly across the population and it's only a matter of time before someone abuses market power to get big enough to be able to choose their ethics over their profitability.That you happen to agree with the ethics advertised by today's market power abusers does not mean you always will. Can you imagine if Walmart started shoving their founder's staunch conservative christian values in your face? How about all the business owners that are conservative muslims, do you want those ethics being chosen?
It is far better to regulate the most important ethical beliefs of the day through the democratic system of our government and have businesses with so little market power that they don't dare inpose their personal values on the rest of us for fear of losing their customers to the myriad of competitors biting at their heels in the market.
As I said before. There was a world before Twitter and there will be a life after Twitter. I deactivated my account (and Facebook et al) over a year ago. Not only have I not missed it, I feel lighter without it.
I still find/follow things I like - just not on Twitter (or Facebook and whatnot).
Aside:
Social media that trigger our reward response (followers, likes, etc) will inherently never really work.
People will post things that get the most followers or likes, not what matters. The more radical, the more likes or followers, the better. Not everybody of course, but enough to make these system in total a detriment to society.
Mass judgement of people based on ( alleged ) reputation is dangerous to both the judged and the judging alike. The same is true for such behaviour within smaller groups.
"Hacker News" is one such group.
Perhaps it would be appropriate leadership and ethical to source technical facts and opinions prior to judge anyone or anything, with the same blindfold as worn by lady justice - no matter what side we are on. Let's call it the good side, as left and right are captured already ;-)
I am livid that this acquisition has put me in the position of defending Elon Musk, but people are being silly. Twitter has seen more movement on improving the core product this week than it has in the past five years, and for the first time that I can remember an active user is in charge of the site. Musk hasn't even adjusted his CEO chair back to his preferred angle and people are already writing post-mortems like this about his tenure. There needs to be more chill.
Evaluating whether the proposed changes to the site are for the better or not requires waiting a bit to let them actually happen. The complete freakout around Twitter in the media, most of whom have panicked the way a junkie would if forced to find a new heroin dealer, is not helping things. Neither is the online pity party taking place exclusively on the very site that is supposed to be dying.
Someone should archive all these "let me dunk on Elon's Twitter acquisition now" posts and comments. If Elon's Twitter isn't a smoking hole in the ground in a year's time, a bunch of these comments are going to look really silly. If it actually succeeds in doing something interesting, or even just succeeds in roughly maintaining status quo, then seemingly a large majority of internet commenters really ought to examine their preconceived notions. It'll be interesting...
Someone should document all of the strident defense of Musk recently. If Twitter does not succeed, my guess is that many of them will attribute it to anything other than Musk’s management.
Some ideas for that story might be:
- Elon never had a chance because woke celebrities and activists pressured advertisers to not renew their contracts with Twitter
- Twitter employees were too lazy and entitled, or maybe they intentionally sabotaged Musk’s plans for ideological reasons
- The government unfairly cracked down on Twitter, which would have been desirable a year ago but is completely unnecessary now that the good guys are in charge
- Well, Twitter’s revenue and userbase might have cratered, but really Elon won in the end because now it is a place for free speech. He never cared about the money, why are you so focused on the money?
- Twitter might have failed but it was going to fail before Elon bought it anyway so it’s not really his fault
- Elon easily could have made Twitter profitable but he realized that the cultural problems ran too deep so he turned his attention to more important projects
You can name any successful company, and you can point to a large group of people who said that the company was going to fail.
Generally, humans have a bias towards saying things are "impossible" or "sure to fail" with limited personal understanding of the nature of that thing. Indeed, people are more expert about impossible things than possible things...they have encyclopaedic knowledge of things that don't work (this is a safety behaviour that some are more disposed to than others).
I have learned, through personal experience of getting this wrong, that people will surprise you more often than your pessimism will be justified.
Musk so far has talked about fixing search, adding the ability to post long-form video and attach long text to tweets instead of having to paste images of text, like an animal. He's also reworking the site business model so that heavy users can get a subscription tier with more features. These seem like... pretty sensible directions to take the product, based on how people are really using it.
The "fired" people get to sit around doing nothing at full pay for the next three months, while the not-fired are being asked to do a reasonable amount of work for an engineering staff of thousands. As to the mocking and whining part, if it bugs you then don't read his tweets. I've hated the guy for years and that approach has worked great for me!
>He's also reworking the site business model so that heavy users can get a subscription tier with more features
You mean Twitter blue?
Forcing it by combining it with the blue check and cutting feature like ad free articles isn't a good way a getting paid customers
>The "fired" people get to sit around doing nothing at full pay for the next three months
And then? Bills still need to be paid after these 3 month and at the moment most companies put a freeze to hiring new employees.
>while the not-fired are being asked to do a reasonable amount of work for an engineering staff of thousands.
Implementing a feature with short deadline or get fired sounds reasonable to you?
Forcing managers to work 12 hours and 7 days a week is neither
It doesn't bug me, but it shows but customer relationship.
He mocks the people he wants to pay the subscription and scares away or blocks advertising customers.
He fired the accessibility team (who cares about the disabled, apparently), the human rights team (Twitter is in many countries and this has implications), and several other teams that were concerned with people's wellbeing.
You may be right that it's premature to guess on directions the company will take. But these acts are pretty clear.
I think Pinboard is more likely to buy Twitter. And honestly this might not be the worst thing that could happen to it. Not sure if Maciej will be keen however.
With the exception that I don't have a problem defending Musk, I agree with this, especially the benefits of having someone who is a user in charge of the site. It's pretty clear that there were massive problems with impersonation and inconsistent moderation on the site, and this week seems to have made progress on those aspects, among others.
This is my take on it as well. I think Musk has been a complete douche lately, and I've never bought into the "Musk is Tony Stark" narrative.
However he is a nuanced human being, and so even though I don't like his current public persona, I know there is more there than just that.
Maybe twitter will collapse (that would be really bizarre) given all the people that still love to use it (I stopped about 18 months ago). Maybe it will become even more popular (kinda doubt it). No idea.
Regardless, the frantic claims are tiring and pointless except to monetize outrage.
Meanwhile, all the takes on how Elon will have engineers shipping so many features is amusing. No sense of mounting tech debt and how that limits your ability to scale. Getting something quick out the door being your only objective. I don’t expect Elon to understand that dynamic, so he will just discover it the hard way when he is confused why all the sudden he can’t ship anything.
My comment is more about where it is headed. If you have been following Twitter you can read accounts of engineers pulling all-nighters, working over the weekend and “launching” the verification feature. Then, read accounts of users trying to use it but said feature not working. A few iterations of this for different features/products, and it will quickly impact his ability to ship anything (likely due to no automated testing in place, poor design decisions, etc.).
Yeah, Elon managed to build one of the earliest and most important major web services, but since then he's just been farting around doing rocket science.
How is he supposed to handle a website that processes literal terabytes of data every hour? In real time mind you
When you have 8K employees that do nothing for years, you build up enough tech credit to spend it on a lot product features before having to worry about tech debt.
I don't understand this argument. If 8k employees were laying technical groundwork that can be transformed into product features more efficiently than greenfield work, how were they "doing nothing"? Twitter is a mature product used by millions, not every engineer is going to be shipping user-facing changes regularly.
So far, those who claim to be fired Twitter Japan employees are all jocks and queen bees. No nerds. They are crying for their PCs are suddenly bricked and can't use at all. The way their talking sounds like they don't even own a PC at all.
A self-claimed Twitter Japan engineer, who hasn't been fired yet, said remote work is hindering their productivity for there are so many video meetings and hardly any time to code. He hopes ending the remote work to reduce the cost of communication.
There is no way to fact check those people, but seeing all the stupid moves from Twitter Japan, like announcing to partner with infamous far-right organization to combat the human right issues, or offering a old man who repeatedly commit dogeza for those whose Twitter account are locked for unknown reason and there is no human response from Twitter, so they chose to visit Twitter physically to negotiate the account unlock, indicates Twitter japan was hiring morons.
Lots of people are saying the fediverse is more friendly. Of course it is, it has only 0.001% the userbase, and all those people are super enthusiastic early adopters! Just as Twitter's tone changed over time, so will the Fediverse. If it is even lucky enough to succeed in the first place.
Recent discovery documents show that user engagement is driven by a disproportionately small base of power users, a group that has been shrinking even before the Musk takeover [1].
I don't think the masses especially care who owns the platform. But the power users probably do, especially as big changes around content, editorialization, and monetization are being discussed.
If that small base of power users continue to leave, then the masses stop coming to the site.
I don’t care if the person in charge is Elon, or some other random person, this post this has one thing right:
Things are changing.
…and they are changing fast.
The problem with fast drastic change is that it is relatively unpredictable.
That appears to have, clearly, caught people, including Elon with his pants down. It’s even more unpredictable than expected.
No one likes change, its just a fact of life… but change this fast, and in ways people didn’t expect is really making people uncomfortable.
Did anyone really have a good idea what bring down the wall in Germany would do? No, they had no ducking idea. Likewise, anyone claiming prescience about what is going to happen here is simply speculating.
They have no idea.
It’s too much change, too fast, to easily predict.
All these “you’ll come back to this thread…” posts are embarrassing cat whistles by idiots. No one has any idea what’s going to happen.
Coming back, later, and being like “I called it!” will simply mean you made a good random coin flip call. Nothing more.
I clicked the link to Elon's tweet, and of course the replies are full of American right wingers making US politics of the situation. Because "muh free speech" is going to make Elon's Twitter as successful as Kanye's Parler I guess. Or maybe Truth social? Or perhaps Voat?
Why does Elon induce such strangely bad faith takes in people? Of course he understands what Twitter's business model was. He's trying to change it. It's perfectly reasonable to criticize his choice! The direction he's taking it in might not work out. But the idea that he "doesn't know who the customer is" is absurd.
There's a bunch more strange takes in this piece, but this first one is pretty emblematic of the class. Elon very well might fail, but there are perfectly reasonable explanations for the things that he's doing, and the way that he's doing them. He's hashing this all out in public in real time because he wants to move extremely fast, and he clearly feels that most of tech, and Twitter in particular, have become fat and lazy. His remedy is to avoid the drawn out process of a "normal ceo":
> Instead of doing what any sane new CEO of a troubled entity would do (namely, determining what changes need to be made by spending a bunch of time listening to customers, users, and employees — and then carefully plotting and executing those changes)
And instead iterating rapidly, in public. This approach has obvious drawbacks, but it does have benefits in terms of iteration speed, feedback, and avoiding certain kinds of institutional bias. It might not work out, of course, but why are we pretending that it makes no sense?
The guy is clearly competent. He does some things I don't always agree with, and I think in particular he's taken a bit of a strange turn in the past few years. However, he's built more successful wildly successful companies - in very difficult industries - than nearly anyone on earth. The idea that he doesn't understand Twitter's business model is just fundamentally a non-serious thing to say.
You don't turn a plane in flight by slamming the yoke as far left as you can. If you know how to fly, then you know how to make a fast turn, but that means knowing how flying works, how the plane responds, and how your current state will change in response to your inputs.
Twitter's business is advertising sales. Musk destroyed a billion dollars in committed pre-sales for 2023, then drove away more advertisers in his attempt to fix the situation, then threatened prospective advertisers with "thermonuclear name-and-shame." He's basically destroyed Twitter's ad sales model without a replacement revenue stream ready to go. $8 for various perqs won't replace a fraction of it even with significant uptake, and this is in the context of adding a billion dollars of annual debt servicing in a company whose revenue was only marginal profitable with the ad sales.
On top of that, cutting half the staff with zero notice and ordering a billion dollar reduction in infrastructure costs is a massive amount of organizational chaos added at the same time as he's expecting to iterate quickly and replace a multi-billion dollar revenue stream.
None of this is a sane way to remake twitter into an agile, non-ad-dependent company. This is controlled-flight-into-terrain. These are desperate, flailing measures.
If you're thinking of the video I'm thinking of, where the blond woman with a ponytail is in an incredibly nimble stunt plane and it looks like she's doing exactly that, slamming the stick one way or the other [0], I think that illustrates my point even better: when she does it, acrobatics result because she's an amazing pilot of that plane; if I was sitting and did it, I'd be splattered on the ground as quickly as it took to fall from the sky.
Doing the things that skilled people do doesn't get the same results if you're not also skilled in the same way.
> You don't turn a plane in flight by slamming the yoke as far left as you can. If you know how to fly, then you know how to make a fast turn, but that means knowing how flying works, how the plane responds, and how your current state will change in response to your inputs.
I'm sure that's true for planes, but I see no reason to believe it's true for Twitter. He's fired a lot of people, but as far as I can tell most of the teams that were killed weren't mission critical.
> Twitter's business is advertising sales. Musk destroyed a billion dollars in committed pre-sales for 2023, then drove away more advertisers in his attempt to fix the situation, then threatened prospective advertisers with "thermonuclear name-and-shame." He's basically destroyed Twitter's ad sales model without a replacement revenue stream ready to go. $8 for various perqs won't replace a fraction of it even with significant uptake, and this is in the context of adding a billion dollars of annual debt servicing in a company whose revenue was only marginal profitable with the ad sales.
This is true, and an ordinary business owner (particularly of a public company) wouldn't do this because they're afraid of losing money for a quarter. Elon isn't as afraid of that, for obvious reasons. He clearly didn't anticipate the advertisers would do this this quickly, especially before he even made any changes. I'm not sure most people anticipated that.
However, the speed with which he's moving has its advantages as well. He just fired 50% of the staff, which presumably nearly cuts their costs in half, since most of a company like Twitter's costs are salaries. So, he does have some breathing room to lose some revenue.
> On top of that, cutting half the staff with zero notice and ordering a billion dollar reduction in infrastructure costs is a massive amount of organizational chaos added at the same time as he's expecting to iterate quickly and replace a multi-billion dollar revenue stream.
This is true, but thus far that chaos has been completely manageable. Twitter hasn't gone down or had technical problems that I'm aware of. It's still very early, of course, and it might have some soon. But I don't see any evidence that anything he's actually done has caused problems yet.
The teams that got cut entirely all seem to me to be non-mission-critical, in a revenue/uptime sense. The mission critical teams got minor haircuts. It doesn't seem at all to me like he's putting the site at risk of going down in a technical sense.
Any business operating at Twitter's scale (and I mean this in a business sense, not a technical sense) has far more to do, operationally, than sustain mission-critical activities. The accessibility team is gone; the curation team is gone; the moderation team is gone. This is what drove advertisers away: Musk promised that it wouldn't become a free-for-all hellscape, and then eliminated the organizational controls that were preventing just that.
It doesn't matter if they have enough runway to last a quarter without revenue if there's no prospects of bringing back enough revenue to sustain the business, and thus far, there's no hint of any revenue stream sufficient to do so even at Twitter's reduced headcount. And Musk now has to find those new sources of revenue in the middle of organizational chaos when Twitter is least able to execute on any new ideas or iterate effectively.
Do you remember when Digg was king of the Internet, and then they released a badly received update and a week later were no longer even a top contender, eventually to be sold for $500,000? This is the market in which Musk is trying to iterate quickly by lighting everything on fire to motivate those who are left. I'm sceptical, to put it mildly.
Yes, every single person on Twitter is required to post how it's now Shitter, how they're leaving for a mastodon instance, and then later how they're returning to Twitter because their instance was too full of racists and fascists.
In many ways Musk represents what is usually the HN ideal: former software engineer, driven and ambitious, nerdy, past successful companies under his belt…
But because he’s doing something seen as political a bunch of nobody HN anons feel compelled to say he knows nothing about running a tech company. Amazing what politics can do to the mind.
It’s less politics and more his management style. I do not admire bosses who force their reports to work nights and weekends because of some wild, off-the-cuff promise that now needs to be fulfilled instantly. I do not admire bosses who tell their engineers to print out their commits on paper so their performance can be measured by LLOC.
I have posted about this a lot recently because I am worried that other tech leaders will take this to heart and treat their employees the same way.
