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Comment by fredgrott | Hacker News Reader

The Elephant in the room is what is being provided.

Elon is already at the limits of his hours on a daily basis to devote to things with SpaceX, Boring Company, Tesla, etc.

Picture it this way, Twitter is your startup and Elon proposes to buy you out. Would you not question how much time we would devote as part of the buyout talks?

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It’s not relevant. Is anyone expecting him to be the CEO? Far more likely he’s going to appoint competent operators to run Twitter. Whether this is a good outcome for the shareholders is the only germane point up for discussion IMO.

> It’s not relevant. Is anyone expecting him to be the CEO?

The article quotes a shareholder rallying behind Musk's offer as justifying his support for Mr Musk's personal involvement.

The article includes quotes from shareholders such as “He has an established track record at Tesla,” and “He is the catalyst to deliver strong operating performance at Twitter.”

I'm not aware of a single instance where shareholders were excited by the prospects of the new owner delegating managent to a random unknown employee.

Imparting one’s philosophy onto a platform that is for the most part static is the most one could do without bastardizing the platform.

Twitter’s biggest moves since its inception aside from TOS/legal/anti-evil have been character count, ads, timeline algorithm, gifs/videos/polls, and connecting NFTs to your avatar. Nothing groundbreaking on the user side.

Musk could get kudos for simply hiring an intern to add an “edit button” as he’s already hinted at.

Yet that is what he has done at both Tesla and SpaceX. He set the company vision and direction and his hand picked executives execute that...

I look forward to seeing who Elon pickes to replace all board members and executives at twitter

I dont really understand how Elon could just ignore Twitter, if something happens in Spacex, they can handle it in private, but if something happens in Twitter, like Trump is unbanned and he starts to share Russian propaganda, everyone is going to know about it right away. Is Elon going to sit and focus on other things while his phone is going mad?

>>Is Elon going to sit and focus on other things while his phone is going mad

I would assume he would smile and laugh just like the rest of us non-authoritarian left people (we are the majority) as the Left drives itself insane with non-sense like what you just claimed....

When the deal succeeds TWTR will also become private.

I think Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX would disagree with that statement. As to day to day running of SpaceX, Elon did exactly that and seems to have picked the perfect person.

I haven't seen much evidence he's good at delegating. Such as how he remains in control of his own Twitter despite the SEC warnings and penalties.

He doesn't need to spend much time with his companies to damage them.

Don’t you think it would have been very visible if he were bad at delegating? His companies tend to produce results - not always on time, but that’s to be expected in greenfield projects right?

Not only do they produce results, they tend to save humanity while doing so.

> He doesn't need to spend much time with his companies to damage them.

Couple of questions spring to mind:

1. Can you define "damage"?

"Elon Musk poised to collect $23bn bonus as Tesla beats targets" [0]

"Tesla reported record revenue and profits for the first quarter of 2022 [..]"[1]

2. Would you say the current management of Twitter are doing a good job on behalf of their shareholders?

"Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates; revenue forecast light"[2]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/21/elon-musk-s...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/04/20/elon-musk-...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-misses-ad-revenue...

> I haven't seen much evidence he's good at delegating.

You think Elon Musk created two of the most valuable companies in the world without being good at delegating?

I think pretty highly of him, but not that highly.

Which of his companies are damaged?

From a strictly financial shareholder perspective, it doesn’t matter if he shuts it down tomorrow. There may be many people holding Twitter that care more about the product then the financials though.

LBO meet BBO.

It would seem that Musk already spends a fair amount of his spare time using Twitter, for free. One might attribute no small amount of Tesla's stock price as well as his child with Grimes to it. Even with a diminishing amount of time to dedicate to running Twitter as a business, Musk is one of the most effective Twitter users of all time and clearly understands the platform on an intuitive level, which bodes well for any critical interventions he might make on it.

> Boring Company

Aside from a supposed pedestrian tunnel in Texas and that Tesla demonstration tunnel in Las Vegas, Boring Company has delivered 0 tunnels. Pretty sure it was started for meme potential only.

Oh, and the “flamethrower”

Not agreeing or disagreeing but I think it's important to note that it just raised $675 million valued at $5.675 billion: https://www.boringcompany.com/seriescround

It could absolutely be another SpaceX.

But it could also be another Theranos.

I’ll leave the guessing to other people.

I frankly wouldn’t care, I’d be looking at the buyout amount.

How much time he can spend is a much bigger question if he’s being hired to run the joint.

I’ve been following SpaceX for many years. Usually, Musk says that he works only on SpaceX and Tesla. He spends basically no time on Boring or any of his other companies.

I doubt that he plans to run Tw himself. Tw’s problem is that it is run by ideologues. To remove the ideologues is the main goal of this entire move. That step alone would probably double the value of the company.

How is Twitter run by ideologues?

In my experience, in terms of moderation, it's mostly run on autopilot. Humans, if they're involved at all, have very little time for individual decisions and how often someone is reported seems to be the most important metric for their decision.

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