a) It is valued at about a 1/4 of what it was purchased at.
b) Twitter Blue has generated an irrelevant amount of revenue and churn is increasing [1].
c) Roadmap looks poor. Video is a terrible direction where only Google, Amazon, TikTok etc have been able to make the numbers work and that's because it is subsidised through other revenue sources. Payments is DOA given Twitter's inability to comply with existing regulations let alone how difficult KYC/AML is to manage.
d) Regulatory and legal risk increases by the day. Lawsuits continue to pile up and EU/FTC are hovering around as Twitter is not in compliance with previous agreements.
e) Brand safety continues to be a huge challenge that isn't solvable without effectively going back to what Twitter was previously.
f) BlueSky and Instagram are both releasing competitor apps to the broader public in the coming months. The market simply won't sustain this many text-based social media apps.
a) Meta had similar swings of over 3x between a 2021 high and a 2022 low. We can only guess what Twitter would be worth today if the stock was floated, but it isn’t. Substituting market valuations with our personal beliefs isn’t interesting.
b) Every social media company has a well populated graveyard of failed experiments behind them.
c) Opinion.
d) Business as usual for every social media company since the dawn of time.
e) Opinion. And advertiser behaviour suggests otherwise.
f) History is littered with new entrants which fail to unseat the incumbent. It does happen, but it’s statistically rare.
Except for data points like Twitter Blue subscribers, number of active lawsuits, failed video startups etc.
As well as comments from Musk himself about the decline in the value of Twitter and from advertisers themselves about the challenges around brand safety.
g) bot account traffic has gone through the roof after constraints were removed. Follows from random bots occur multiple times a day on accounts with a couple dozen followers
h) the tweets served are no longer weighted towards followers but instead whoever paid for blue checks
i) accounting on views is entirely wrong with a tweet registering a billion views
His biggest issue was trying to convince the remaining engineers and Elon that a refactor was more promising than continuing to build on the layers of spaghetti code that runs twitter.
I don't disagree with him, it's just clear that he didn't understand how dire the financial situation was and that even a progressive refactor starting with the most basic features would take considerable engineering hours and money.
Spent two weeks trying to find someone to build a faceted search UI and then quit.