Jack Dorsey Texts Elon Musk (March 2022) | Hacker News Reader

Jack Dorsey Texts Elon Musk (March 2022)

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48 pointsmfiguiere7 comments

How does Elon trying to buy Twitter fit into this? Completely reworking Twitter with these ideas seems to be harder than just creating a new thing, so I doubt that was the goal?

Moving millions of people isn’t a simple proposition. And these types of markets are winner-take-all so there isn’t much room for a competitor.

I've always wondered about this.

Migrating users off twitter seems like it might be simple (ie 1 click migration via oauth and apis to migrate tweets and followers I'd imagine). I think the carrot doesn't need to be all that big these days as twitter splits up their user base with paid and unpaid users as well as far too many ads in all streams (sans add blockers).

Heck I think you might even be able to post back to Twitter if the user migrated to keep un-migrated followers in the loop. (Although it's been a while since I've looked into their API).

I don't really know how you would motivate the cross section of people who have ad blockers though as I think this is the critical part (ie what is less friction).

You also need to probably have some relevant marketing (ie the Opera/Aston effect) to pull in the significance to start the fire too (this might be organic given the generational "not your parents thing")

Come to think about it. If you could overlay the graphs you might not need to assimilate but be a valid competitor making it less of a winner takes all.

Although come to think about it in that case I think perhaps APIs would be shut down to close this vector of competition.

Maybe it puts him into an always winning position?

1. He gets forced to buy twitter and rework it with these ideas so users don't have to be displaced?

2. He doesn't have to buy twitter and invests in a new platform entirely while denouncing the platform on his way through court?

While it does sound like it would be easier to start a new thing, I don't know if you can uproot an entire population overnight either. Perhaps these two could with their notoriety.

The subsequent tweets in the linked thread explain it: he wanted to completely rework Twitter.

Note: these were probably tweeted after your comment.

>he wanted to completely rework Twitter.

Read the texts released in the court documents. There was no "master plan" to "rework Twitter". Elon was angry that he was going to get denied the board seat, so he went from zero-to-I'll just buy Twitter in, literally, less than an hour (according to the timestamps).

Then there was lots of babble about a web3 blockchain based social network and payment platform that sounds absolutely terrible and hair-brained.

So in Twitter v. Elon Musk (2022), a large chunk of Elon Musk's text messages were just published for sake of "discovery" (the final phase before a court case, where the final arguments of both sides are being planned, but not argued yet). I'm not 100% following Twitter's argument here overall, but the focus should be things relating to Elon Musk's pending purchase of Twitter at the $54.20 per share price point.

I'm sure in the next few weeks, we'll see Twitter's arguments (and Musk's counter-arguments / Musk's arguments) on the relevance of these text messages.

Until then, I expect a lot of sleuths to be digging through and reading the tasty trove of celebrity text messages here. Its just what people do...

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