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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if revenue and employee count were completely independent. Heck, you could fire everyone except one person and have an incredibly high ratio! (Don’t fire that last person or else you’ll get a divide by zero error.)

Interestingly, he’s already tweeting out complaints about a massive drop in revenue. His theory is that this is caused not by his erratic behavior, but instead by activists who hate free speech: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880?s=46...

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That tweet really makes me think he has gone paranoid / crazy.

“Activists groups pressuring advertisers trying to destroy free speech in America ?”

The dude is a conspiracy theorist now ?

Yes? He tweeted the Paul Pelosi's gay lover conspiracy last week.

If the last two years have taught us anything, intelligence is not correlated with the ability to believe conspiracy theories.

It's quite troubling, and with little recourse it seems?

To some extent he actually thinks he can’t do anything wrong except be “too ambitious.”

So the more undeniably-short-sighted-flat-out-wrong stuff he does the more logic goes out the window.

I'm sorry, but on Twitter this is hardly a conspiracy theory, just a normal day. Activists constantly pressure brands, for various reasons.

Musk's prime motivator for purchasing twitter seems to have been ideological. Of course people are going to oppose him on ideological grounds.

More succinctly, Musk performed an activist takeover.

Twitter could have let him out of the deal but forced it. This is all on the (now former) board of directors who probably received a nice payout for a new mansion.

He could have, at any time, just paid the 1bil breakup free.

That fee was for external factors causing the deal to fail. Musk was already committed. His attempt to walk away was construed as breach of contract, and he would be liable for much more than the fee if that had happened.

This was not an option with a publicly owned company. For the board members to walk away from this offer would have breached their fiduciary duty. They certainly benefitted as did everyone else with stock.

Activists: take credit

Some dude: "it's totally not them!"

Why would he not think that?

I'll ignore for the moment questions about what "activists" is supposed to mean and whether it refers to a real group capable of making unified decisions. Regardless, it's just not great for leadership to blame a revenue drop on unrelated third parties even if those third parties are working against the company and taking credit for the revenue drop. This isn't like complaining that trolls came in and review bombed your movie on IMDb. Revenue is an actual metric. If the claim is that the revenue numbers are only very briefly down because advertisers are only pulling spend in response to some temporary PR issue, then sure, make that argument.

I don't understand how anyone could not blame activists for this? They themselves are taking credit for it.

Who is "they"? Activist is an expansive noun that covers every possible viewpoint, so this is meaningless without further qualification. Is it randos on Twitter, or someone with actual clout?

IPG and ADL both pushing hard to pull advertisements.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/158860354056966...

Not to mention there’s countless cases of this happening over the last decade, across payment processors to CDNs.

Were the activists controlling ad spend?

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