Thoughts about Twitter
nolancaudill.com
nolancaudill.com
Regardless of your opinion on Elon, it's simply too early to conclude that this is "likely" to happen, or that all those people will stop using it.
For those old enough to remember, major social media platform changes have happened and users have sworn that it was (effectively) the end. Sometimes they are right: see new Digg causing a mass Reddit migration, or banning adult content on Tumblr, turning a dying platform into a dead one. Sometimes they are incredibly wrong: see new Reddit[0], or, amusingly, people who claimed that Facebook switching to an algorithmic news feed instead of chronological was the end of the platform. I can't remember how long ago that was, but I imagine Facebook has increased in userbase and value 3 or 4 orders of magnitudes since that change.
[0] Yes, I'm aware old reddit is still accessible, but the vast majority of the userbase is on the mobile website or app.
Regardless of how you feel about free speech, not everyone likes it. Even the perception that twitter is getting toxic will drive people away… except the toxic people. The only thing holding twitter up is that there’s no alternative for the people that matter - the “blue checks” who drive most of their traffic and engagement. Yet Elon managed to piss them off anyways.
Also software engineers: be sure not to fire Ned or else the whole bridge might collapse
So your patient might be ok if you fire Ned, but if you try to make changes and a critical system goes down, it might take you a lot longer to fix things without the specialists in that system.
You could keep one specialist around for each system, but then you have a very small bus factor.
Software engineers: We did document he was a load-bearing Ned. He was Ops, of course he doesn't code regularly.
Look at all the other major engineering failures in history, it’s always small things (a gasket) on a bad day (too cold?) that somehow works day after day until one day it magically doesn’t and you get the Apollo incident. Everything goes catastrophic over tiny things. Imagine if NASA fired half their team before that incident. The only guy who knew the gasket can’t get cold might not still be there because Ned got laid off.
Even if you can refactor and simply their work to half the workload, you can’t do that within a week. Even the boring organizational stuff is crazy at this scale. They for sure slashed whole teams at once. Who turned off those services? Or if they’re meant to be running, who owns them, organizationally? Where is the code living, what repo, what part of the code base, when something goes wrong, what metrics are being watched? Overnight teams had to become responsible for twice the code/services, potentially stuff they have never seen before. Bloated or not, that’s not easy.
Twitter runs their own data centers, which means they own all of the THOUSANDS of machines in them. These machines, and all of their parts, have shelf lives and CONSTANTLY need replacement.
When they are replaced you can't just go to Best Buy with a credit card. At scale VERY SMALL changes matter: oh look they changed something in the disk firmware and haha now your databases corrupt data one out of 1M writes.
New machines need to be tested, burned in, installed. Old ones need to be cycled out.
Same goes for power equipment, networking, all that.
Because you built your own data center, and you were an early scale company it ALSO means a huge percentage of your systems are home grown - asset management, deployment, health checking, metrics, you name it. There are no articles on Stack Overflow. There is no blog post. How that shit works is mostly a function of what people knew about it and, well, at least half of those people are now poof - gone.
This hasn't even gotten to the services themselves, many of which are now running without an owner or any person at the company who has ever looked at them before. The remaining people are now up to their eyeballs in drama, survivor syndrome, fear, and, oh yeah, the work of many of their laid-off peers.
Few people, pfft, give me a break.
Agree. Twitter was a going nowhere dumpster fire before the purchase. It's going to be a bumpy ride, but it could end up better or disappear. Either would be fine with me.
Everyone on this site (and even many non-tech people) had their own ideas on how to fix Twitter. It was a given that it was a mess. Musk had the money and hubris (I don't think he wanted to really buy it), to actually say hold my beer.
Regardless of what you think of Musk, he loves Twitter and now has a lot of financial incentive to make it function better as a business. So we'll see.
So far, Elon's been a dynamic and inconsistent figure. He's not representing a stable, known offering where things won't radically change with his whims.
IMO, he needs to stop tweeting and he needs to build a team who can represent the policies and offerings of the company. Obviously he has that in place at Tesla and SpaceX (in greater degrees than he has brought to Twitter so far).
Even if the $8/mo offering is a bargain, it also has to feel reasonable. So far, Elon's not making that case for himself, even while he's basically making the case that he is Twitter now.
The status quo was so bad - I'm really curious what's going to happen. I'm optimistic.
Boy that's an understatement. It was already kind of a neutral value shithole, but now he's got to figure out how to wring a profit out of this $45 billion dollar dried up cow. And he's got to do it without his usual trick of nursing from the US government teat. Good luck, Elon. You're gonna need it.
> It is immoral, dangerous, and highly destructive to our democracy for any advertiser to fund a platform that fuels hate speech, election denialism and conspiracy theories. Until actions are taken to make this a safe space, we call on companies to pause all advertising on Twitter.
I dont think twitter changes caused much of uproar in the past, like when they extended the character limit painlessly (unlike facebook). The audience is there mostly for the narrative, not the format.
It kind of was the end of that platform and the beginning of a new one. One likely much more profitable and also much more destructive to liberal democracy.
(Liberal as in the real, proper sense, not the newer slightly illiberal liberals)
proving that the world truly is insane, I use old reddit on mobile as well as new reddit is more or less unusable on a mobile browser they hard force you in to their terrible app. If I need a mobile app I use a 3rd party app as the offical app is TERRIBLE
When/if they kill old.reddit is the say I stop using reddit, I would say my usage is already down 80% since the launch of reddit, as I pretty much only use the technical subreddits for news now, staying away for all other area;s of reddit.
Exactly, these people use it for their own exposure/benefit. If it harms them if they stop, they will not stop.
I served in the mosh pit. I knew the mosh pit. The mosh pit was a friend of mine. Twitter, you're no mosh pit.
I think Elon is already feeling the blowback from immediately misunderstanding it based on this tweet[1]. It's going to be interesting to see how he intends on making up that $5b/year.
It is very typical for big advertisers to have a change of ownership exit clause. It is also very typical for these contracts to only establish the unit rate, but without a required minimum spend amount.
The bigger nail in the coffin is IPG recommending their clients pull out; they probably represent a third of F500 ad spend. I would not be surprised if the other three firms in the big four are recommending the same. It's not just car brands.
edit: it'll also be interesting to see if other social media sites (primarily Facebook, Reddit, Snap, or TikTok) or advertising platforms (Google) retaliate against Tesla now that Elon owns a direct competitor. Tesla enjoys quite a lot of "free" word of mouth advertising on their platforms, and those platforms all have the means to bury positive sentiment and/or amplify negative sentiment towards Tesla.
this reads like a Trump quote. People are free to use their speech to pressure advertisers into dropping Twitter. Or, rather, "voting" with their wallet.
We can be critical of his actions, but at this point, assuming incompetence is foolish.
I'm not trying to dickride the guy, obviously a lot of people contributed, but this literally just happened and we all saw it. How are people rewriting it successfully?
Tesla has done a great job to shake up a complacent status quo of car manufacturers, and to especially lead the curve of EV adoption in the US. That's not nothing, yes, and is absolutely a team effort. It's also not the best run business model and there's a lot of questions still about the long-term sustainability in their cost cutting and their over-reliance on credits and promised but not delivered features. If we want to credit Elon as the sole "business guru" and the company is relying on business models that are less than stellar, it's fair to criticize Elon's role in Tesla with respect to their ongoing business model issues.
There have been times where Tesla's stock, to generate additional liquidity, has had SEC violations alleged against it and most of those were directly "great business man" Elon Musk posting SEC violations directly to social media and pretending they were honest mistakes (and having enough reasonable doubt to not get the "Martha Stewart treatment").
I don't think there's "rewriting". There's 15 years of questionable business practices that was criticized at the time, yet seem easy to sweep under the rug now that Tesla looks popular and is a darling of certain investors.
Intelligence comes in a lot of ways - clearly Elon Musk is incredibly intelligent, but only in some ways and not in every way.
Trying to play devils advocate here, I don't fully believe that Musk will be incompetent in handling Twitter, but I definitely think given the current evidence it's possible his understanding of how to operate Twitter is less comprehensive than how to operate a hardware driven tech company.
Do I feel sorry for the people who got layed off? Of course I do! I wouldn't want to be them right now. I feel for them. But the consequences mentioned in this post is completely unreasonable. These are the kinds of points you hear from a depressed person who thinks the world is going to end because all the toilet rolls are suddenly out of stock.
The amount of doomsaying I see everywhere regarding the Musk takeover is baffling. I am no Musk fanboy but this is completely irrational. The fact of the matter is, people don't like change. That's all there is to it. Change automatically makes people cry out.
Here's a scenario for you:
What if the new Twitter is better? What if it isn't the toxic place you expect it to become? What if you are completely wrong? Have you considered that? Here's how I see this situation:
Musk is not an idiot. He must know exactly what he needs to do. This isn't his first rodeo and comments like "running a service of this scale and size is incredibly complex with downtime and uptime and blah blah" is incredibly naive. Musk runs at least 2 companies that require a huge network & availability guarantees. He knows what's needed there.
Twitter is going no where and if you think it'll go down in the coming years, you have a surprise coming your way. I am optimistic because of Musk isn't known to give up. This can fail for sure but I don't think that'll be the end of it.
The next step in my opinion is cutting down on the Twitter codebase. Trimming features. Shutting down unnecessary stuff. They laid off 25% of the workforce so at least 25% of Twitter will be affected. Let's see which parts though. There's a lot of unnecessary junk in there (communities, spaces etc.) that I'll be happy to say goodbye to.
That's assuming that those 25% were actually putting in work at Twitter.
How does this square with the attempts to get out of the deal? I think your points would make a lot more sense if he hadn’t signalled extremely clearly that he thought the deal was terrible.
You don’t need to make excuses for him or pretend he is infallible!
I didn't say and don't think "this was his plan all along". I've done nothing to make excuses for him and I don't pretend he is infallible (indeed I once wrote an op-ed in a national daily newspaper examining his flaws [1][2]).
Occam’s razor requires us to believe what all the evidence indicates and nothing more: He was originally willing to buy it at the price offered in the prevailing market conditions in April, then the market crashed and suddenly the price he offered was too high, so he tried to negotiate/force a lower price (and we must assume his investors/financiers were demanding this as any professional investor/financier would), and when this failed he just went ahead with the purchase, which he always said he was committed to.
The only thing there is evidence for is that he wanted to reduce the price, just as anyone would after such a market decline. To believe anything else requires mind-reading, which you seem to be trying to do not only of Musk but also of me.
So, please, stop trying to read people's minds and just look at the evidence before us!
[1] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/the-bes...
[2] https://medium.com/moonshot-labs-blog/ego-what-startup-found...
It’s a toxic pit where people with boosted self-importance exchange silly reactions and replies, with no meaningful conversation whatsoever.
This seems to be a person that thinks that they had something beautiful and nice that contributed to the public sphere and doesn't realize that for many this event in which twitter may change drastically or die is a good thing either way.
Then again if I was in a server room where 4chan, kiwifarms and twitter were hosted and I had a revolver with two bullets I'd shoot the twitter server twice. I'd be baffled if I ever learned in some quantitative way that the site was a net good.
> Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop.
Is this true?
Shouldn't giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?
When I was oncall for my team, I found there were less pages, less issues, and the system was generally more stable.
Entropy, leading to availability problems, grows with rate of production changes.
If no one touches the code, my guess is the system is more stable rather than less.
Of course the solution can't really be "let's not deploy anything, just to be safe", because then your competitors are going to launch new features and leave your product behind.
PagerDuty is a multi billion dollar company for a reason, and they're not even the only company doing what they do.
I don't think it's relevant if one has worked in a giant company to understand how bad on call can be, every engineer knows that. I personally assume on-call is much worse/harder/nerve wracking in bigger companies
Giant tech companies do obsess about reducing the need for human intervention. Teams in my org at AWS kept track of failures/intervention rates per thousand instances. If it gets too high, it means you're spending too much engineering effort resolving on-call issues and need to fix it.
They do. You automate recovery for all the failure modes your system has encountered. Then the system promptly fails in a new way you've never seen before.
Often because some totally different part of the system fails when scaling to new levels.
The companies where it was not true, was a pleasure to work in. The management, from C-suits downwards knew what they were doing. In the others, it was a total chaos.
Of course, if everything is fixed with duct tape, you need firemen ready to act. If everything is solid and robust, there can be small outages, but nothing too critical.
For example, one day SRE got alerted that a bunch of expensive accelerators were unexpectedly shutting down and not restarting production. SRE has to reach out in this case to the SWEs who build/designed the system to ask some clarifying questions. Together, the SREs and SWEs form a series of hypotheses about the cause, ultimately discovering an entirely unanticipated failure mode.
I think I'm one of the few people in the world who has attached a $100K oscilloscope to the voltage regulator on a machine learning accelerator to debug why a specific training job that did a series of convolutions at a highly specific rate would cause a DC-DC regulator to act like an AC source. It took far, far longer to write and deploy the rule that detected this problem in prod than it took us to identify the problem and stop the killer job.
The general philosophy at these orgs is that the same failures should never happen _again_. So you build automation and safeguards protecting the system from the failure modes you know.
However, any complex system will have failure modes you don't know. There might be new software, new features, new APIs etc. going out that interact in complex ways. So complex systems will fail in very interesting ways. So the general philosophy in operating these systems is:
1. First get the system back into a state in which the problem is mitigated. 2. Apply some short term hacks, rollback any suspicious recent changes. 3. Have someone go a bit deeper and try to root cause what caused the failure, have a discussion about it with impacted teams (often called a postmortem) and come up with long term fixes that reduces or eliminates the root cause from happening again.
And then there's this idea that Twitter was some great, happy place until the last week. That's simply not true and Twitter hasn't changed in any way whatsoever yet.
What we know so far:
- Twitter will rollout a paid account system where if you pay $8/month your tweets will actually be visible to people and you'll see less ad's. This will ensure bots/scammers have difficulty posting to Twitter because their non-paid posts won't be seen by many people. People are more likely to casually browse Twitter now and people who profit from writing on Twitter will have better engagements.
- Twitter is working on ideas to let users seta threshold for what they want to read/see. If you want a G-rated stream, then you'll be able to do that. For people that get triggered or don't want their ideas challenged then they can mute that much like you can avoid music and movies/media you don't want to be exposed to.
- Twitter fired a lot of staff. Unsure how this pans out. Some people think it was ridiculous to have that many people. Others think it will cause the entire thing to break. No one really knows anything here. I have to assume Elon's team has spent months analyzing what they believe is lean muscle and what is the fat they can cut.
How can people draw these impossibly detailed predictions on its future from these actions? Musk has a history of being bet against and proving the doubters wrong. Anyone there in 2013 when TSLA shipped the first Model S batch knows how much he was hated and bet against then. He has also failed to deliver on some promises. We'll see.
If you don't like twitter stop using it and stop taking "news" about tweets seriously, because they are not serious.
And yet from a technical perspective, I've already noticed broken links. Duplicate tweets being posted. False notifications... the cracks are already showing and its one day in. Others have too.
This has a cascading effect that people who previously do not necessarily care on the whole about who runs Twitter are now seeing the app simply not work how did yesterday, and attributing it to the new management.
Not saying any of what I spelled out above is what happened. But it is entirely plausible that thousands of jobs across the organization could be cut, and stability and uptime could improve.
There's always money in the AWS bill but that's a lot of money to expect to be able to find. And, um, this kind of thinking is one of the things Mudge was talking about.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-i...
Musk wants to save $1B from infrastructure costs, so the service quality will very likely degrade. The current business focus is money saving at all cost so I don't think SRE or whatever engineers are not very safe from layoffs.
Oh and good luck with cutting dependencies on those storage while firing all those engineers with knowledge on those infrastructure. From my experience, migration and deprecation is usually much harder (I would say 2~3x difficulty) than launching a new stuff especially in an established big company.
One can only hope!
edit: For those not aware, the buyout included $13 billion in debt to Twitter which they need to pay $1-2 billion a year for in terms of interest alone.
So now he is supposed to keep dumping money into the burning dumpster fire that is twitter?
Anyway, it's beside the point. Elon OWNS twitter. Do you all understand what ownership means? Like how you own a phone? If he wants to smash his new toy into the ground and break it that's his prerogative. Employees need to stop deluding themselves that any part of a business belongs to them because they were part of the process in creating it. The salary you are paid is the price for control of everything you contribute to a company.
If you hate that idea, much like I do myself, you should start your own business.
In the end, he bought Twitter without being forced to, because he probably saw he was going to lose in court if he kept up with trying to get out of his binding agreement.
This is why a person needs to understand the contracts they sign. If you don't have an out, you can't change your mind. If you can just change your mind to get out of a binding contract, then it's not a binding contract.
Separately, I'm not making any comments about Twitter employees and their claims against the business, that's a completely separate topic.
The employees do have power, they could refuse to work en-masse and he can find out how hard or easy it is to hire a completely new crew. But I'm guessing there's too much internal strife and disagreement for that to happen.
Plus I have to agree with his assessment - there's not that much to twitter really, it's hardly a massively complicated and sprawling software product. They have too many people. Some of those complaining about being let go have... titles that don't make that much sense for the kind of businsess twitter is. I hate seeing people lose their job. Companies should be a bit more circumspect in their hiring.
And he does own Twitter, yes. Everyone is just laughing at him spending billions of dollars to destroy something due to a problem he created. It just also sucks for the people involved being hurt by a billionaires tantrum.
Who do you think signed the contract in the first place?
He was only "forced" by the courts once he tried to go back on his contract. Nobody forced him to buy twitter.
The complication here is that his offer was so outlandishly high that he essentially tied Twitter management's hands. If they had not sued him, they would almost certainly be subject to litigation from their own shareholders, because not doing everything to sell at this price would have amounted to corporate mismanagement (In practice, top management gets a lot of leeway from the courts when it comes to maximizing shareholder value, but I can't imagine leaving a 30%+ markup over the current stock price on the table would have passed muster).
Actions have consequences which is a basic thing that it seems some people have a really hard time understanding.
edit: If one can ignore contracts at will then much of modern society implodes.
He OWNS the company.
> Actions have consequences which is a basic thing that it seems some people have a really hard time understanding.
Yes, this is what happens when you choose to be an employee of a company someone else owns. You are at their mercy. That's the deal.
So you are Elon and have some shitty company that is burning $200m or more a year. Are you all saying he should keep paying these overpaid yuppies to do nothing but come into work 3 hours late and drink matcha lattes? Even if he was feeling generous, don't you think there are more deserving people of that charity?
So you agree that this is 99% on Elon past, present and future. Great that we're in alignment on my main point.
Everyone knew what selling twitter to elon meant for the employees and the company. There were rumors of mass layoffs weeks ago. It was forced through still anyway.
So in addition to Elon, everyone that cashed out of twitter is responsible for what's happening to the company now and all the employees that allowed the company to become fat and bloated are responsible too.
You think that if he paid completely up front he wouldn't care about cutting costs? Why? The pressure would still be there -- it would just be in the form of pressure to recoup his investment
Ironically, Musk rewarded the owners of the company by paying an inflated price for it.
If you don’t have a thick skin like Musk, you must self-censor yourself pretty heavily to avoid backlash and sometimes humiliation. Just liking a controversial tweet or following a problematic account can get you on the bad side of people.
I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving.
Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using. Either way, the point isn't how bad Twitter is in your personal opinion, the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse.
> Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using
I‘m an ex heavy Twitter user. I primarily use it for keeping up to date with tech, but the signal/noise ratio is not great nowadays. I can see myself switching to Reddit and HN completely.
> the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse
That remains to be seen, no? What’s the use of writing that a week after an acquisition?
For verification it will no longer be a status symbol for anyone and will let Twitter get higher ad rates as they will be pushing to self verified real people. Say pay a higher ad rate for advertising only to verified users.
I think the idea that Twitter can somehow boost ad revenues while removing moderation is just that.
Elon is taking a big risk here, and I doubt that he truly knows what he is doing.
None of what he is doing with Twitter seems to be rational. The rational thing for him would have been to stay away from Twitter as this is clearly a harmful distraction for his mental health and his other endeavors.
But that does not mean the outcome will be as catastrophic as some are predicting.
very productive start
One of my hobby horses is pointing out people that bend themselves in knots predicting that Uber will fail tomorrow (still waiting!) because they, personally, _don't_ _like_ Uber. There's a similar phenomenon with Elon Musk. Behold, Elon Musk, the guy who runs a car company and a space rocket company, will be completely stymied by keeping high availability on a website? THAT's the bridge too far that he just won't be able to build a team to solve? This is either extreme self-delusion based on an emotional need OR just an example of a classic web engineer who is too wrapped up in their own world to understand that other hard problems exist.
Just 3 days ago, Uber announced another quarterly loss of over $1 billion. They are failing, if you judge by profit and loss.
elon is playing you, everything is fine, he just wants free attention to spread platform news to people without spending $
all the complainers are his new marketing network and it's glorious
How is that different from Stripe layoffs from yesterday? I believe Stripe employees also didn't know that they will be laid off, and they got similar compensation to what Twitter employees got.
Stripe's layoffs were part of the business climate; Twitter's layoffs are the result of the new owner deciding to fire half the company.
- Pay until at least February 21, 2023
- 2022 annual bonuses even if you're not around at bonus time
- Pay for unused time off
- Six months of healthcare
- Accelerated stock-option vesting
- Career support
- Immigration services support for visa holders
Twitter didn't make their terms public (there's a difference), but reports are:
- Pay for 60 days (January 3rd, 2023)
- One additional month of severance if you sign a release
Note that Musk's merger agreement included some other things:
- Performance bonus paid out at target
- Cash contribution for healthcare
- Equity vesting accelerated by three months
Slightly ironic that they're employed by social networks. Said tongue in cheek because these are people with livelihoods and looking after families.
There are others that are concerned with big tech in general and its role that have been marginalised in mainstream news. Is there actually any pioneer in these companies that thinks social media on a global scale can work for good, apart from Elon Musk, apparently?
The whole centralisation of the net was a problem in the first place.
The national average wage for the USA is roughly 70k according to a quick Google search, unless you’re suggesting the devs are making $4.9 billion per year I think you’re not using exponents correctly.
> According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median wage for workers in the United States in the second quarter of 2022 was about $1,041 per week or $54,132 per year
Which puts your estimate of the average silicon valley wage at $2,930,273,424 per year.
You can spot stupid[*] replies miles away when there's no attempt to engage with the substance of the argument.
[*]: Yes, stupid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
Rather, I think it makes the original argument look irrational if they have an extreme exaggeration if they have to use that to make their point.
So yes, I think there is a “grave epistemic problem” with the first sentence that hurts the argument and its credibility as a whole, without having to get into the details of the argument itself.
That you called the first replier “stupid” or even their argument “stupid” is wholly unjustified.
The fact nobody will engage in the good faith argument, but rather take the least charitable interpretation and spew verbal diarrhea around the assertion instead of directly addressing it is further evidence of the point.
What I get from this whole experience is big tech employees, likely on a wage double their national average, are able to communicate more widely to the world about their disenfranchisement about being unemployed than others made unemployed who are not.
Now that I've done the hard work of fixing the typo that apparently invalidates the argument, it ought to be trivial to provide a counter-argument.
Elon has owned Twiter for less than a week. How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure? How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?
The article does touch on this a bit. Elon went in "with a red pen": his entire first week from an outside perspective was spent looking for costs to cut, departments to toss, and things to shutdown. It culminated in a 50% (!) layoff in the first week. That's not usually the sign of a healthy start, especially if you assume that the previous owners weren't that crazy and had somewhere upwards of 100% redundancy where you can just fire 50% of the company without consequences.
> How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?
1) The Peter Principle: incompetency has a way of failing upward in businesses.
2) The "Gravity" Constant of Money: once you've made enough net worth it attracts more automatically. Billionaires are basically "black holes" of passive income no matter what they think their day job is.
What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions?
Maybe? It's not just that's an early layoff. It's that it is an early layoff of a huge magnitude. Again, a 50% layoff means that the previous status quo had upwards of 100% redundancy. That is unbelievable for any company, no matter how unprofitable. (I could believe it of a very profitable company with money to "waste", but a publicly traded company getting asked every quarter why they aren't profitable yet? I can't believe it. If it were that simple to cut overhead, shareholders would have demanded it years ago.) Feel free to give Musk the benefit of the doubt and assume Twitter really was that unhealthy. I feel there's a lot more reason to be skeptical here.
> What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions?
I may be a bit hyperbolic claiming that the Peter Principle must especially apply to billionaires.
But, it is entirely possible to believe that Musk succeeded entirely on luck and his decisions didn't matter (for good or bad) in the long run. EVs were a huge gamble 15 years ago, but it also didn't take that much of a crystal ball to know that they were "the future". Space is always a giant gamble and the most successful always seem to just be the luckiest. (That was one of Heinlein's hypotheses early in the space race. I think a lot of sci-fi writers still believe it to be true today. Admittedly sci-fi writers don't have the most hard data to prove/disprove such a hypothesis, but it is still a useful hypothesis.)
None of that requires "proving" that the companies were successful "despite" Musk. I think there is evidence of some questionable business model practices, too (and there's plenty on Musk's business decisions out there to find; it's not "new" criticism), and I have provided some of it in at least one other thread, but at the end of the day: when you are judging someone based on the number of poker chips they have on the table, it's fair to question if it was all just random luck, especially when that someone is also acting a bit as the Dealer and getting a chunk of House money too.
Nail on the head for what really bothers me. None of this (or the Trump/Freedom/Truth Social) opinions comprehend the fundamental concepts behind free speech. At best, they're ignorant, at worst, they've co-opted the concept to wield it against those whose speech they don't like.
Musk’s initial Twitter takeover talk was met with general opprobrium, to put it mildly. I must have read more than one take that it was a threat to democracy itself.
Then, after a stock market downturn, and when the Twitter acquisition looked more like an impulsive decision that Musk might regret, the prevailing mood was gleeful. He was stuck with a white elephant. Schadenfreude. And since he clearly no longer wanted it, the consensus now he was legally and morally obligated to buy. Twitter itself demanded it. They weren’t going to let him weasel out of that one.
Now that he seems to have accepted his obligation and the sale has gone through, we’re back to opprobrium.
It’s callous to laugh when so many people have lost their livelihoods (although I’m confident any former Twitter employee has plenty of employment options). But the commentariat consistently outdoes what a satirist could invent.
Does it matter that his method wasn't ideal, at least he wasn't pushing for nuclear war like many politicians.
And in light of past civil wars, what is the best solution for neighboring nation? I am fairly certain every country has taken land this way, so maybe we should give Texas and California back to Mexico?
Russia is NOT in the right, but Russia's actions don't change how we should be pushing for peace.
Where have all the hippies gone?
The American invasion of Iraq, that was kicked off with a night of bombing destroying nearly everything, that was much more than anything Putin opened with I don't agree at all with Putin's actions, but could you please explain how they are genocidal?
The Ukrainian treatment of ethnic Russians, the incessant shelling of civilians in the separatist regions, the widespread embrace of actually Nazi ideology, and the cutting off of freshwater supply to those areas seems a bit closer to genocidal to me. Just a bit.
Everybody wants peace. Peace is a good thing. But what most people agree on is that you don't give an autocrat anything they want just for the promise of peace. Most people remember that lesson from 1938.
We generally know how Chamberlain's whole deal turned out.
All war ends in appeasement.
"We will have peace," said Théoden at last thickly and with an effort. Several of the Riders cried out gladly. Théoden held up his hand. "Yes, we will have peace," he said now in a clear voice, "we will have peace, when you and all your works have perished--and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us. You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter a men's hearts. You hold out your hand it to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor. Cruel and cold! Even if your war on me was just--as it was not, for were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired--even so, what will you say of your torches in Westfold and the children that lie dead there? And they hewed Háma's body before the gates of the Hornburg, after he was dead. When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you and Orthanic. So much for the house of Eorl. A lesser son of great sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers. Turn elsewhither. But I fear your voice has lost its charm.”
― J. R. R. Tolkien
To me, Musks calls are equivalent to saying “ok, now freeze the frontline until Russia has had time to rearm and rebuild for the next push”.
We tried the “peace” proposal Elon put forth in 2014, thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians are now dead as a result.
Don't forget WW2, when Nazi Germany under Hitler annexed Czechslovakia in 1938, invaded and split up Poland in 1939 and all the Great Powers did not do anything due to either appeasement or isolationism. We need to learn from history, expansionist dictators do not stop and conceding to them only leads to further war and likely world war.
Maybe that's a bit too much to ask of humanity at this stage of its development, but a person can always dream!
That's bad for him and so far it seems bad for Twitter, but it was good for the shareholders, and it's good generally that contracts get enforced.
It has already been proven Twitter will stop being the Twitter its users have enjoyed for the past decade. You are free to argue Twitter will be better for it but there is absolutely no disputing the old Twitter is dead.
The point I was making is that nobody seems to think any particular thing, other than that which can be post-rationalized from their feelings, pro or anti Musk. The whole thing has the loosened-reality-grip feel of a culture war battle.
> Firing the leadership and a massive percentage of the workforce at once changes who the company is. I am not entirely sure why this needs to be explained.
Sure. QED. But not a point related to mine.
> That just means what you wrote is not related to anything I wrote
See parent post.
That just means what you wrote is not related to anything I wrote
Dorsey left, didn't he? There's been some fairly major executive turnover over the years. Twitter sort of hummed along, didn't it?
You remarked, hyperbolically I'd say, that he speed ran the destruction of a $40 billion-whatever acquisition in mere weeks. That may turn out to be true. But it hasn't happened yet. I think many people want this to be true, but this is an exceptional event and is hard to make dispassionate predictions about. It's possible, but improbable that it'll take the shape of Newscorp's myspace acquisition, or Verizon's yahoo acquisition. Those were services that were already in steep decline. I don't know for sure, but Twitter appears to be relatively stable when it comes to user activity.
Overall, I think the prognostication around this acquisition has been inflamed by culture war biases.
You have already agreed with me on this in a different comment. The pre Musk version of Twitter no longer exist, it has been destroyed. Musk has destroyed it. Whether or not the brand name of Twitter continues to exist or be popular is yet to be determined but Twitter as we knew it is dead.
The Atari brand name and intellectual property continues to exist but that pioneering video game company hasn't existed for decades
The value of their core product is not primarily technical but social and cultural, as has been pointed out ad infinitum (the “twitter clone” microblogging weekend project in new language/framework is a cliche). Musk does have the ability to quickly burn that cultural capital. But it’s too early to tell to what extent it will happen, and in what ways it will hurt the service.
Even the most outraged user claims are unreliable. Too many users get too much value out of the professional, cultural and social networks they’ve formed using Twitter. I’ve already read one gloomy, regretful account of migrating to mastodon. There’s a high probability that many of these users, who are loud but unquestionably in the minority, will eventually return after self imposed exile.
Whether the product itself will implode or degrade for technical reasons, very few are in a position to accurately predict.
Comparing Twitter to Atari seems unfair to Atari, a company that had success in several markets and that successfully innovated for a sustained period of time.
I think an instructive comparison may be Musk’s acquisition of The Onion staff, which (according to my memory of the incident) he did primarily out of spite. His attempt to launch a rival humor website with those writers flopped disastrously, and was quickly forgotten. It’s support for the argument that Musk will approach a cultural product with an engineering mindset. But it remains to be seen what, if anything, he learned from that experience.
Could be part of a pump of the stock. Something he's done in the past, see FSD,coast to coast trip with no driver, battery swaps, the Cybertruck roadster and Semi, whatever that robot was,4680 batteries..........
Twitter wasn't profitable and probably was never going to be. Those tweeting will probably lead healthier and more productive lives doing other things. Those consuming content may have to actually read substacks, blog posts, reddit posts and other means of delivering content that are less a knife fight, and more a reasoned argument.
Twitter was rarely the Budapest cafe. It was more the favala rival gang war. If it dies at Elon's hands then its another boon to society, along with electric vehicles and comparatively cheap and reuseable space flight.
No. The results of failed management (said management has now departed)
It's telling that "journalists" was put first. I've heard many times that Twitter is "useful" to journalists, who I assume feel like they have their finger on the world's pulse. It might explain why so many news stories include random opinions from unknown Twitter users, and why they are so out of touch with (at least my) reality.
If this was a HN comment it would get flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Better to apply the guidelines to actual HN comments.
David Sacks is to the right, Elon is center-left, and Jason Calcanis is a bigtime lib. For the past three days, rightwing Twitter has been screaming that Elon has "caved" and so on because Trump, Alex Jones and a few others haven't been unbanned. (Personally, I'd like to see the Babylon Bee brought back as a gesture of good faith, pun intended.)
How is the combination of those three "rightwing?"
Also he has manufacturing plants all over the world (China), so he would lose the most from violence (while many other billionaires are profiting from war).
> He was literally pushing for peace talks in the Ukrain-Russia war, where lots of people are dying right now.
That does not make Musk left nor anti violence. It rewards violence. It makes him either naive or pro Russia.
It allows Russia to torture and continue genocide in territories it has. It rewards it for invasion and creates situation in which Russia will logically invade again.
I know I was center-left for a long time, but the same values that I had 10 years ago as center-left are considered center-right at this time. I believe it's the same with Elon.
Nope, centre right at best. Or, if he is actually centre-left (neither of us will know), he has (for the last couple of years) been sucking up to the right. The effect is the same. I assumed he was playing each side off against each other so, again, the effect is the same as if he is right wing.
Calcanis maybe a lib, but his actions are hard core capitalist ... so for the sake of this situation, his actions will be right wing.
Sum total: rightwing.
I'm not a fan of Elon Musk and his vaporware vehicles.
I'm not a fan of Twitter, but have been using it more than usual recently.
I am a fan of free speech and associated universal laws whether online or off based on a level discourse playing field.
I feel terrible for all the people suddenly left at the beginning of winter in one of the most expensive places on the planet without a job, and hope they all go on to better and brighter things!
..but Twitter wasn't turning a profit to begin with.