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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

I made a half-joke here on HN a few months ago that Musk was buying Twitter just to destroy it for the lols.

Maybe everyone's wasting their time with rational economic analysis, trying to figure out a pretty simple guy with an obscene pile of fuck-you money and an axe to grind.

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Everyone is looking at it too short term. Twitter isn’t going to disappear and he has shown a willingness to ride through rough economic times to reach his vision.

Social Media is how people interact with the world now, most info we receive is filtered through it in some form. In the last 10 or so years the idea that these platforms need tight moderation to control what and who is speaking on them has become ubiquitous. I think his main gamble is that the future of social media does not involve automated moderation and tight content restrictions, but a more open platform and he is gonna use twitter to play that bet out. It isn’t a horrible bet.

Is that why Twitter is suspending accounts that tweet things that hurt Musk's feelings? That sounds like tight content restrictions to me.

Hurt his feelings or impersonating him. I've seen him replying to people insulting him and not suspending them.

There's plenty of examples of Twitter removing and/or suspending content that Musk doesn't like[1][2].

[1] https://i.redd.it/5hgt89c599y91.jpg

[2] https://external-preview.redd.it/LvQhCbGd3mXlAjyj0GktvQaAJ_3...

So two? What an epidemic.

2 is enough to show a pattern that never existed before. Twitter now has a king and if you insult him and it hurts him, you will be restricted or banned.

2...

In a sea of a 500,000,000 tweets...

...a day...

Are you familiar with the term statistically insignificant?

If that is how we judge bad behavior, basically Elon Musk could block 100,000 tweets per day because he doesn't like them and it still would be statistically insignificant, and thus it wouldn't matter? Your logic is incredibly porous, but I think you know that and you don't care.

Your response to receipts is this?

Why are you assuming that I posted an exhaustive list?

> Twitter isn’t going to disappear

You seem more confident than Musk is reported to have been in today's sudden all-hands meeting; what do you know that Musk doesn’t?

EDIT: see, e.g., https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-10/musk-tell...

He has a pattern where attempts to create false peril in an effort to motivate people. Which is maybe telling about his managerial style that he relays on fear rather than inspiration.

How is warning that the company can't afford losses forever a false peril? It's just saying out loud what everybody knows anyway.

Interesting observation. Spirit of our age? Terror management rather than bringing out the best we can be on a wave of optimism?

Bankruptcy isn't always a bad thing. It can be a good thing, depending on how you use it.

People who do not understand bankruptcy laws often perpetuate wrong myths. Bankruptcy is just a legal insolvency mechanism to stave off problematic creditors, while you find way to handle assets against the liabilities of the company. A bankruptcy isn't always the end of the world, and smart businessmen know this.

Musk has a ton of people advising him on legal issues. It's possible that he's making the wrong business moves, but the fact that he's publicly seeing ahead at the possibility of bankruptcy, tells us that he's navigating the waters cognisant of avoiding it rather than to ensure the outcome arrives.

> Twitter isn’t going to disappear

Isn't it? Ok, maybe Musk has a magic wand that he can use to make it profitable (which it has been for only two out of the last 12 years), or is willing to subsidize it indefinitely out of his deep pockets... but I wouldn't bet on it.

It’s not a new idea though, having a completely open platform. It quickly devolves into cp, racism and general abstract violence. We’ve learned this lesson already at this point.

Obviously not completely open. Open in the sense of ideas and viewpoints, not like an open market for illegal activity. More like one where Trump wouldn't be banned.

Is that a good or bad thing? I don't know, in an ideal world humans could self-regulate and make good decisions about how they use information. The status quo is that we cannot control ourselves, and need to have sophisticated controls that filter out objectionable info.

> Twitter isn’t going to disappear

Digg, Myspace, Google+.

They don't have to disappear but they can fade away into irrelevance.

He has runway as long as he is able to fund it, so there’s an upper bound.

This is important, he can fund it but not forever. He’s owned it what 2 weeks now? In the current market I’m lucky if I can order paint for a small building and have it arrive in 2 weeks - these days it takes more like 3-6 months. He appears to be moving at lightning speed with these changes. The thing is, when you are moving 10 times as fast as normal you can trip up 10 times as much and still arrive on time.

Musk loves Twitter. You don’t have to point to the billions he spent on it, you can just see that he loves using it. He might want to change it, might destroy it accidentally in the process (like a kid who hugged their beloved pet too hard), but he didn’t set out to destroy it.

I made this comment to a friend recently that I don't think enough people are considering that he might actually be mad enough to have spent $44B to destroy a toxic business.

> destroy a toxic business

Twitter is more toxic under musk..

It's been barely a week he's at the helm and you came to that conclusion? I'm indifferent about Musk, but that's absurd.

It doesn't come from me, it comes from people who care about brand image.

Who are these people?

People like this guy https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921

No idea who that person is, why they're important and how this proves that Twitter became more toxic in just two weeks of Musk compared to 20 years of the previous management. Care to enlighten me?

That person is president and COO of MMA global, huge marketing firm, given the fact that he was in a call with Elon, along with that class of people regarding brand safety; he is an important person and his comments describe the situation. He mentioned that their concerns are brand safety and moderation, and that’s why people are pulling out.

For them to pull out it seems that associating with twitter harms their image, and that’s - according to them - related to moderation.

As for “proof” that twitter is more toxic;

> In the week leading up to Musk's acquisition, researchers said there were no more than 84 hostile tweets an hour on the platform. But from midnight on October 28 – the day Musk took ownership – to noon the next day, there were 4,778 hate-filled tweets. That accounts for more than 398 tweets an hour, about 4.7 times higher than the seven-day average leading up to that day. The potential reach for those tweets was more than 3 million, researchers found.

> Researchers also said there was an increase in negative sentiment, with more than 67% of the tweets sent after Musk's takeover having a negative tone.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-twitter-caused-measur...

What brand image? A bunch of random people posting ridiculous things one massive flame war?

See the parallel chain.

So much more toxic, 15 million people joined ...In a week.

Spending $44B to prevent the endless terrible hot takes of the Twitterati from polarizing the world to the point where the rest of his stash becomes worthless. I like it.

He's doing his own fair share of polarization too.

"Ukraine should just let Russia keep what they've got now, and agree to their demands and wrap this all up."

Right? They should led the blood bath continue until we're tossing nukes at each other!

Russia should just withdraw and stop invading its neighbours.

Would we do the same?

I would. But it's true, aggressors rarely listen to reason. They care about strength and about cost. The US didn't withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan because it was the right thing to do, but because it was too expensive and there wasn't anything to gain. Russia may also withdraw once it becomes undeniable to them that there's no winning this and it's too expensive to continue trying.

There's lots of people arguing for peace talks, and I'd love for that to work, but it won't work if Putin isn't interested in peace, and by all appearances, he isn't. He's made pretty clear that he isn't. The only alternative is to make is aggression unsuccessful.

Then the only alternative is nuclear war.

That's a bit extreme. I'd prefer something in between: stopping Putin but without escalating to nuclear war. Pretty much what's going on right now. It's not great, but it's the least bad option; preferable to nuclear war or genocide.

It is extreme. Remember the news about the 2 people killed in Poland from stray missile(s)? Commentators and the Ukraine Government were quick to assess this missle was launched by Russia while the USA investigated. Yesterday the news was that the USA found that the missile was not actually launched by Russia. But the west could have made hay about it and decided those two farmers that died would have been plenty justification for a nuclear war. Lots of ordinary people wanted it.

I prayed that, that outcome would not happen.

Letting Russia do whatever they want is arguably not a great strategy towards stopping proliferation, since it sends the message that you're free to do as you please if you have nukes.

The hole in that theory is that by all appearances, Elon Musk really, really likes using Twitter. I don't think he wants to kill it. I think the madness is two-fold:

(1) he approached this with a "pfft, I could run that business better than the bozos in charge" attitude -- it's not as if Twitter has been known for great management up to this point, right? -- but never actually came up with a plan beyond "not what they've been doing." After he initially made the offer, he spent all the time he should have been formulating business plans trying to get out of the deal instead. Then it got forced on him, and he's had to scramble.

(2) Elon has millions of people who treat him as a combination of Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Tony Stark, and bluntly, I think he's started believing his own press to the point where he just figures, "Why, yes, I am a super genius who can do anything, and anyone who contradicts me is clearly not worth listening to."

I would be very surprised if Twitter recovers from what Elon Musk, Super Genius is doing to it; the question is whether Elon Musk is going to recover from it. The best case is that this will be his Steve Jobs Exiled From Apple moment; the worst case is that he becomes Howard Hughes.

> The best case is that this will be his Steve Jobs Exiled From Apple moment

Didn't Steve Jobs return to this company when it was bleeding money, cut 4000 employees as his first move and turned it into a cash cow ?

Despite recent stories making this claim, no, not exactly. The 4,100 jobs that were cut in 1997 -- 2,700 full-time and the rest contract and part-time -- came while Gil Amelio was still CEO, and there's a bit of revisionism in attributing it just to Steve Jobs having been brought on as an advisor. Apple had already laid off 2,800 people in 1996 and the cuts in 1997 were widely expected by analysts. They were made with Apple's existing executive team intact and were executed in a considered, directed fashion. I do not think anyone can make a credible claim that Musk's approach so far could be described as considered and directed.

That second point is something I think we see a lot in widely-praised successful people. I think this is also what lead George Lucas to make the Star Wars prequels on his own, instead of having others refine his characters, story and dialogue like he did with the originals.

I can't help but think about something I learned in school about the Roman Empire: when generals returned to Rome after a military conquest, they were paraded around the city on a chariot with everybody cheering him. But behind him on the chariot was someone constantly whispering in his ear: "You are only mortal". I think when everybody constantly heaps praise on you, it's tempting to start to believe that you are a god, a genius, or otherwise high above everybody else. Having people around you who keep you grounded is probably good for your sanity.

That's a very funny spin to still make Elon look good in all this.

Not for the lols, I dont care how rich you are losing 44b hurts. But he is clearly out of his depth.

> Not for the lols, I don't care how rich you are losing 44b hurts.

A band named KLF burned a million quid back in the mid 90s. It was ostensibly "performance art" [1].

In 2000 formative internet commerce pioneer Josh Harris blew about 80 million in a few weeks on an "arts project". He is the subject of Ondi Timoner's 2009 documentary "We Live in Public" [2] He described it as "liberating" and said that other dot-com millionaires had "wasted their money" and didn't "know how to live".

Maybe Elon fancies himself as an artist?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Live_in_Public

Is it true that $13bn came in the form of loans and that those loans are secured by Twitter, not Musk or any entity he'd personally be responsible for?

If so, how does that work?

Just google LBO, plenty of site explain that better than me

If the business under new ownership turns a profit their bankers make money. If the business folds or is not turned around then the loans sour but the private equity owner also loses their money. In bankruptcy bond holders get paid before shareholders.

I think his ego is too massive for that. The man bristles at the slightest criticism. Destroying Twitter, even intentionally, will provide enough fodder to his critics that I don't think he'd be able to actually suck it up and follow through.

Watch Musks interview with Ron Baron instead of reading second hand quality hack articles if you want to understand the scale of his plans for twitter.

the scale of his plans so far includes slashing Twitter Blue prices from $20 to $8 on a whim after talking to Stephen King, a horror author.

yesterday, he also killed a feature that was introduced the day before, because MKBHD, a Youtuber criticized it.

https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15903833662136115...

“Bankruptcy is a possibility”

He wants to turn it into Wechat-like platform.

What's the axe he's grinding?

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