I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars.
It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.
But it's pretty transparent that the cash flow problem is pretty much a problem because the new owner doesn't really want to own Twitter, or believe it can pay for itself; he wants to own a different product which has as many users as Twitter did. No judgement here, I don't necessarily think he's wrong. But why as an employee would I feel obligated to make his choices my problem?
Well, luckily you don't need to buy the premise that cash flow was problem number one—after he bought it, he saddled it with so much debt that it definitely became problem number one!
I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size.
Immediately starts by threatening advertisers, retweets that story about Pelosi's husband, fires people (probably needed to be done) and then this crazy scheme.
The problem as someone else mentioned is that for Tesla and SpaceX those were really the only two places where you could work if you wanted to do electric cars or space stuff. So they attracted very dedicated people.
Twitter is just web dev stuff and these people can work anywhere. It's not a great time to look for a job but when you get a lot of middle aged people who don't necessarily want to upend their life for their job especially when it was extremely cushy before, well, it's bound to be a problem.
I do think he'll probably pull this off but it's gonna be a pretty miserable road.
He really believes he’s smartest guy on earth, god’s gift to humanity and he has moral obligation to achieve whatever he wants to.
That being said I think he is being overly underestimated right now. Clearly he can bring something positive based on history.
SpaceX/Tesla employees work as hard as they do because they believe in the mission of the company. They're willing to just buckle down and do amazing things beyond most people.
Twitter had a lot of normal employees, however, it also already had the true believers in the mission. Those people don't seem to have bought Musk's vision and they're leaving the company. He wanted to get just down to those folks, but I think by and large, they're gone. I don't know that he can recover from that mis-step. He needed to come in, explain his vision and got the true believers onboard before he cleaned house IMHO.
He must know this??
put it on a shirt. twitter is the .01% of web dev. what they do isn't easy and there are no right answers.
... that's the point of the original comment. None of this is unique to Twitter.
WHat I find interesting is the Twitter the business is no more "web stuff" than HN is "web stuff." The real business is on what we might call the product management side, and the central problem to solve when deciding what kind of social media product you have is deciding whether to moderate it, and if so, what you moderate and what you allow.
Even if he miraculously gets enough people motivated work there keeping the lights on and the machine humming, I am with the many people suggesting he has absolutely no idea how to actually run the product side of the business, where decisions like "anybody can rent a blue check for $8 a month" can have drastically negative consequences for the part of your business that sells advertising.
At this moment in time, that side of the business is extremely messy, and it isn't an engineering problem, it's a people problem.
Elon does not strike me as a people person, nor does he appear to be interested in delegating the most important role in the company—the person who decides what Twitter's product is—to anyone with competence in this area.
"Just web dev" stuff is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It's not like Twitter is just some react code on the cloud. It's been around since 2006 and is essentially a massive realtime platform. I don't think Twitter has any unique secret sauce, but the kind of people who can run a large online platform and dedicated metal really don't exist anymore; and under fire they will either need to run to the cloud (increasing costs) or start dealing with outages.
>I do think he'll probably pull this off
It seems far more likely to me that he ends up selling it to Google or something for pennies. So far, publicly, he hasn't communicated any sort of thesis or plan and most of the head engineering staff has been let go. How long do you think it will take to get a new engineering lead up to speed on 16 years of Twitter infra while also meaningfully transforming the company? His only option at this point is maintaining the app on a shoe-string budget to get "profit", but that seems like a very boring outcome that should have been left to a P/E firm.
I guess it says good things about EM that I could totally see waking up tomorrow to the news that he sold it to Google for $75m and a new pixel phone. I can even see the Tweet: “well that was a disaster.”
For all his faults, he does not seem beholden to consistency.
Although Elon appears to be aggressively driving twitter into the ground, this might be one of the few outcomes which actually increases the certainty of twitter getting killed.
I like that you also came up with the idea that elon will sell for pennies when in reality he's basically succeeded at nearly everything he's done. And he's had massive win after massive win. But you think he's gonna fail here.
As an almost ironclad rule, acquisition agreements for big public companies don’t have escape clauses or diligence outs. The buyer does the diligence before they sign the acquisition agreement. His very, very good lawyers at Skadden advised him of this. After it’s signed, it’s really just a question of how quickly the logistics of taking a public company private can be completed.
Musk, for all intents and purposes, bought Twitter back in April. He just didn’t take possession and pay for it until October.
This was not a mistake. He was seeing that his offer to buy twitter was not taken seriously. Understandably the board felt he will flake out. He wanted to show he won't flake out. The way he could demonstrate that was by binding his own hands.
So he went to his lawyers and asked them to write an offer he can't back out from. And then he got what he asked for.
The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Twitter board. They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. The offer to buy the company outright might have been more spite than anything else.
I think he calmed down and realised what a bad idea his offer was (especially at that price), and then spent the next month or so trying to back out.
The second time? Well, he was kind of trapped and was actually forced to buy it.
The twitter board were suing him to hold him to the binding deal to buy at $44 billion that he signed. He only finalised the deal to avoid the lawsuit. It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.
That's certainly looking like it was the right call.
I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. He seems to be very badly advised at the moment. It's going to lead to a elon against the world situation where he wrecks something everyone likes and he's tarnished forever.
He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.
He didn't have that option. That was the fee if the deal fell through for other reasons outside Musk's control. Musk didn't have any out in the contract. When that became clear in Delaware, he gave in.
Of course not, if a company is profitable, its technical debt that made the company money and paid the bills. But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years.
> but it was consistent in experience.
Consistent experience of being spammed by bot accounts. Looking at anyone popular and 95% of the replies are bots, or tweeting the wrong word and being spammed by bots. Is a terrible experience which has never been addressed.
> I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself.
I agree. I think over the years popularity has gone to his head, stroked his ego, and he isn't the same person he was 10 years ago. He may not be the greatest example of a 'good' person but wqhat hes done with Tesla, SpaceX, etc, getting the right people in place and such to build these companies up, hes done well, but in the last 4-5 years hes sorta gone off the rails.
Technical debt is rarely that simple. Usually it is a pile of Chesterton's Fences that only the people who built it really understand why its all there, but if you start just ripping it all down then you wind up breaking something important (think "service which scours databases to ensure that they're compliant with GDPR regulations and avoids a billion dollar fine from the EU" or something of that nature). The code may have grown organically and arguably need to be tossed and rewritten, but most of the time the code in its current state is also the requirements doc for the rewrite (and either the rewrite will take 10 times as long as anyone thinks or else the new system will throw away 90% of the old system without understanding it and now you have to deal with pissed off EU regulators and there goes everything you would have saved).
I'm usually on the side where I think its time to take the hard decisions and spend the effort either cleaning up the existing codebase or rewriting it, but that's rarely the way the business sees things, and they'd prefer to just bolt on some more crap yet again to keep it going for another year because they're trying to boost their metrics, not solve long term problems.
My point is when you're in a small company, even dollar counts, if infrastructure isn't trying to optimize hardware utialization then you end up throwing hardware at the problems. If engineering isn't trying to optimize codebases then you're throwing more resources at the problem (people, hardware, time, more services, monitoring, and safe guards). Then there's issues with marketing, sales, management, etc.
The other day we had that tweet from elon 'apologising' for android being slow and the '1000 requests' which was disputed by one of the engineers and he got himself fired.
But what he said is they have 10+ years of technical debt hindering performance.
Large companies like twitter suffer from the idea they are 'too big to fail'. They have 1000s of engineers and I question, what are they doing, you obviously have enough money and resources, but at the same time why are a portion of those people not sitting there optimizing what exists.
We don't see any resolution to bots, we don't see new useful features, we don't see any attempt to address issues people have been complaining about for 10 years. etc. So we have 1000s of engineers doing what exactly? There's some incredibly smart people working or worked at twitter, but their talents were wasted on effectively maintaining a sinking ship by trying to make it sink slower instead of trying to patch the holes and keep it afloat.
If a piece of code works and only needs changes once in a blue moon… well then it’s pretty good. Even if it’s a tangled mess of assembly.
There's a decent chunk of the population that would be ecstatic if Twitter went away and they never had to hear about it again, so he'd probably gain some fans there.
All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.
When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.
I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.
it's pretty obvious there's a load of sv vultures egging him on
hard to imagine a worse direction for this to go
Let him get distracted with micro-managing whatever cool project is currently takes his fancy, while they do the more boring job of keeping the company running, and making sure the customers are happy. I bet these people are extra happy when he is focusing on projects that don't have customers yet, like Starship/BFR.
Twitter might actually be the first time were he has 100% control over a large company without someone in the background moderating his more wild impulses.
Gwynne Shotwell is the too seldom acknowledged hero of SpaceX, who has played exactly that role of keeping the lights on, moderating Musk’s worse impulses, and managing him into less destructive directions. It’s been evident for years.
There are similar people at Tesla, who focus on the endless operational tweaking and improvement that Musk finds boring, and who slowly fixed all the most critical issues on the Model 3 line while Musk increasingly took to politics and social media.
I’m not one of those who believes Musk hasn’t done anything or played no part in SpaceX or Tesla’s success, because that’s clearly false. But he also hasn’t been the sole genius responsible for all the success or infallible. But too many people have made him believe he was and we’re now seeing the result of that hubris and ignorance.
Offending everyone who matters that runs the product you just bought and terrorizing all your employees is a fast and easy road to completely imploding any company.
Like, yeah, if he did that to well functioning company it would fall apart too, but Twitter wasn't a well-functioning company. And by that I mean "he would ruin it slower".
I was determined to buy a Tesla. Now we placed an order for a VW ID.4.
"Beat up Russia a bunch, make peace and throw Russia a bone by letting them keep Crimea." seems like the death minimising stance to me and in the best interests of the inhabitants of the each region.
Besides that, appeasement has never worked against aggressors in the past. It basically looks like Musk is calling for another Munich Agreement. It shows a complete lack of understanding of history, and of international relations.
That would be like saying "let's throw a bone to nazis and let them keep Poland"...
Except that's not true at all. What he did is saddle it with a bunch of debt and fire of a bunch of really-poorly-considered cosr cutting and revenue enhancement ideas that clearly weren’t thought through or part of a coherent strategy.
He might have and end-game vision, but he had no plausible roadmap to deal with the sucking wounded he inflcted with the acquisition, much less to get to his end-game vision.
If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter.
Engineers not being good is probably not the issue. But I’m pretty sure it comes from higher up.
It’s also evident that Twitter was poorly managed by the fact it’s pretty much never made a profit.
It is not just tech debt per se. In larger companies most middle managers have no incentive to fix things for the long term. And lack of automation means they get to hire more people, which is good for them, as it expands their fiefdom.
I know one company in California which hires H1-Bs by the thousands, many even make it to Green cards. Their work- Somebody sends a bunch of values from the India office, they manually edit shell scripts(written ages ago, by some dude who has long left), run it, get the values and enter those values into some internal application. The thought that all this could be done by web api's didn't cross their mind. Never mind that automating this simple thing could help cut employee count by the thousands. Another place that I heard of, similar things but with SQL. The whole thing could be automated. But somebody wrote a bunch of shell scripts and left shop. Now people need to take outputs from SQL scripts and feed to the next ones. And then cut paste the data into some system.
In the woke world that we live in, where everybody is supposed to be special, and we are supposed to lie to ensure nobody gets hurt feelings. Most people forget, these jobs should have never existed at the first place. Many a times cutting them actually leads to more profits, and saves lots of management effort. Sure people losing jobs is sad, but if you are doing a job that shouldn't exist at the first place, you should likely move before you are let go.
The world is full of wasted effort, it is many times even tolerated for all sorts of reasons. But some times it is not.
That's two figures more than actual. Reportedly, Musk paid Agrawal $42M and spent $120M total on golden parachutes, which is still only low 9 figures. Still obscene. Most employers do not give severance to fired former employees. They were in charge of Twitter while it was losing billions. They should have paid him. He could have saved money right there by giving them the address to the unemployment office.
Pretty hard to fire him for cause with that track record, even if the new owners don’t like it.
And firing without cause triggers the clause.
Twitter was leaking money for 2020 and 2021, the trend looked to be continuing for 2022, they had an OK first quarter, and maybe they were going to continue to do well, but I sincerely doubt it seeing how every single tech stock has performed this year. Q2 alone blew away $344 million loss compared to Q1's $513 million gain. I also sincerely doubt Twitter was being led well by looking at their earnings reports and the money hole that punctured the company coffers in 2020Q2. The middling performance through 2021 continued when that should've been Twitter's best years, all other tech stocks even ad agencies were printing money, why was Twitter not doing the same?
I think Twitter board's best decision they ever made was offloading the company off to Elon, cut their losses for a clearly failing company with little to no headwind coming their way for the next few quarters at minimum.
But I do need to know why does Elon get the brunt of the blame for Twitter's presumed downfall? Seems like Twitter was already a falling knife by itself
Your breathless narration of that data is certainly a master class in spin. Maybe the company was performing far below what would be possible. But it is hard to look at the data and conclude that there was any imminent risk of its demise.
Quarters are only good for forecasting and deciding what to do. Financial year is what matters overall. That’s an indicator of the overall success for the year.
A few reasons
- he's greatly accelerating its decline in a highly visible and embarrassing way
- he got ripped off. $44b is a hilariously bad deal. He could have saved a few billion and used it to run twitter, at a minor loss, for many years.
- and lastly: he tried to catch a falling knife and is standing around pretending he isn't bleeding. Considering the hubris he has put on display over the past 5 years or so, everyone's taking a moment to enjoy the show.
"I've got this old beater that I'm tired of working out of every day."
Your food truck sucks and your food is no better. You should sell churros.
"Churros don't really match our poboy sandwiches." I can fix this, I'll just buy you out for a million dollars.
"... ok, sounds good to me." What do you mean the truck is only worth about three grand? I want out of this deal.
"Here's the signed contract..."Indented guy above didn't get ripped off.
Insanely profitable. those 2 years had more profit than the previous 8 years of loses.
Jack then fucked it up over the pandemic by massively over hiring but Twitter's profit margins in 2018 and 2019 were insane.
If you go to market and buy a lame horse then flog it into the ground, that's entirely your fault, but it's not like the horse was ever going to race well.
Maybe it could have been more. But a profitable business is, almost by definition, sustainable. There was no need for rash action.
Worse, revenue[2] increased but costs increased faster
By all metrics it was burning money faster than it could increase revenue
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...
I have no idea if TSLA is overvalued or undervalued. I don't know enough about the automotive industry, renewable energy regulations, or batteries to even guess.
Destroying it or disarming it is a win for humanity, I guess.
"elon badly managing it" and "twitter being a shitshow before he took over" do not collide with eachother either
The conversation, leaked: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368/ph...
However, I'm beginning to think Elon didn't get the deep dive he needed to understand what this really means. I have my ears up for the language or relationships showing he is really spending time on this... but I have only seen a dog chasing its tail.
At some level, Elon is characteristically aligned with this version of Twitter, however by saddling current Twitter with so much serviceable debt it is probably more difficult to go back in time than it ever was before.
But only after becoming rich on closed-standard Twitter while also enacting artificial barriers for third-party clients along the way?
> a bunch of ex-twitter folks boot up a crowdfunded mastodon instance.
Don't know about crowdfunded, but this instance is for ex-twitter employees.
https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1586166535592509440
An open protocol isn’t going to help Twitter’s debt load, indeed giving up platform control will very very much do the opposite. Musk knows this. And anyways, there are no engineers left to massively redesign their platform to become less profitable.
My unverifiable prediction: no matter how many users will leave Twitter, the ones left will be more than the ones that would be using a new service after 1, 2, 5 years.
Where will users go - parler?
I mean, there is a model that works, it's Discord. Small self-associating groups from various parts of our lives. TBH that's so far ahead of facebook - humans draw meaning from being in groups where there groups are small enough to know and have repeat interactions with people. You all know bigger discords you're in (gpu drop discord lol) where you're just a face in the sea and it's much harder to maintain meaningful relationships in a place like that, fediverse would be like that too. Humans evolved for smaller group sizes and a group of like 30 or 50 active users is EXCELLENT for social media, Discord nails this perfectly, personal communication breaks down at like 75-100 active users tops.
Facebook is an ocean and it's unstructured (Google Plus or whatever had user grouping, which was an advancement imo - you can say "that's a work person" and interact with them in certain ways) unless you go out of your way to set it up like that. Discord really just works amazingly well for that, I have tons of hobby groups and game groups where I've known people for a super long time and friend groups from whatever community. Kids have the "school chat discords" and if I was in college we'd have had study groups on it I'm sure, we had FB groups then. No reason you can't have a "family discord" too (so uncool, mom!).
Mastodon basically is (or could be) that as a protocol, if you want to treat it like that. Dress it up in a discord-like client and get it onto phones/etc and make the user-story good. People already show they'll pay to self-host discord servers etc, so come up with a cool "Algo" style ansible deployment thingy that makes it super simple, just fires up a server on an AWS account for you and gives you a link you can send to your friends etc. Congrats, you are now the Underwater Basketweaving Enthusiasts Discord Server, here's a random (or generated human-meaningful) link. Not everybody needs to run a server, but, make it easy enough that people can do it. And as a user, just join the discords you like and let the server op run it/mod it, just like now.
https://github.com/trailofbits/algo
What exactly does Twitter do in this business model, though, lol? And how do you get there? Twitter's "broadcast" model is nothing at all like that. I guess they're gonna... throw it all away and start fresh? Seems like that's what's happening I guess.
But I guess I just don't see the value in federation generally, to the end user. Pods aren't authoritative, they're decentralized and human-meaningful (in Zooko's Triangle), so oauth type stuff doesn't really matter, I would never want to "auth against UnderwaterBasketweaving" or whatever, because it's trivial to spin up another instance and make fake users etc. And why would I want to "cross the streams" between my home and work pods, or let Wendys marketing come and mine/advertise my server, etc, if I'm the one running it? Am I paying for wendys to scrape my content? Consistent cross-discord-instance identity is all I really want from social media, at most and that doesn't need to be tied to this at all, you can do that via google auth or some other idp(s) that solves that problem. Where is the revenue stream in this at all?
I don't want "community moderation service" in my decentralized communities... there are places where "work moderation" would pitch a fit and some places where work protocol would be incredibly uncool. But with small communities, O(1) moderation works fine, you don't need it, just let the discord server op do discord mod shit and delegate roles/etc to other mods too. Yes, godmode is fine in self-organizing communities because if moderation drifts sufficiently far from group norms the community will reorganize without you. Crossing the streams also ruins that, it means you have to moderate the firehose or punt it to an authority who will, and it's all just a big "why" when discord mods are fine.
Similarly, want a feed of interesting content? We had an app for that, it was called "mee6 bot", and the server admin asks what twitters/youtubes/etc people want for certain channels. You want a new channel? Ask for it, or make it. I am on a server with 30-ish active members and everyone has basic "add channel/rename/reorder/etc" and "warn" punishments etc, it's fine. If you're constantly being a dick you'd get kicked out but it's never been a problem. Family discord, or work discord, or some other close-knit irl community? just let people do things. social ostracism will keep people in line with the norms, people mostly don't like losing friends.
(maybe disk quotas though, because that is one that will add up faster than users realize. Nobody has solved "free content service" without it being tethered to another business, like youtube or imgur or discord. no, I am not interested in your IPFS childporncoin either. give me a sustainable, "local" method for hosting content... like requiring users to host content themselves on an instance or server hosts providing user-quotas for hosting etc. Define how important you consider your content (indefinite, 30 days, etc) and refuse new uploads if they're past quota.)
And if you just want a service where you click it and it runs in a hosted instance by a cloud provider... well, discord exists, and dropbox remains popular even in a world of NASs, etc.
But none of that has anything to do with Twitter or will have anything to do with Twitter, lol.
- Smaller streams, fewer people, more personal.
- No great feed of everything. You go to a place to read about a thing. Different thing, different place.
If discord had a bit more work that would enable persistent threads like reddit, and encouraged longer, more thoughtful posts like HN and quality moderation, it would be perfect.
Actually, what I want is HN/Discord mashup. Anybody want to fund it?
Facebook Groups is this product - but it's exceedingly difficult to find the small percentage of well-moderated, smaller groups which are specialized/for enthusiasts. Also, the FB sub-comment/response structure is far worse than HN or Reddit and leaves much to be desired. But I've joined a few with good moderation and thoughtful, interesting discussions.
That being said, any group with [thousands] of members or loose moderation devolves into an absolute shitshow of shit posting and scam/spam posters.
human empathy and working set is totally limited by team size and cache level, you need to optimize for facing the same problems/interests as the person next to you.
Families/localities/regions are the cache layers of empathy. And I'm using "family" broadly.
"Contextual communities" I guess.
I actually detest some companies using it as official communication for their product as none of the question answered are googlable so instead of googling "how to do X" and get some forum post, there is nothing and you have to sign onto their discord and ask same question.
Him saying he's working on web5 should really clue you in on the kind of lying clown he is.
Quick explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDZWWFSZUF0
The board predicted this would happen.
He was hoping he’d look like such a mess they’d step in and shitcan it.
But no one took the bait.
The one who is actively threatening to nuke us because we’re sending millions of tons of weapons and ammunition to someone they’re invading while we sanction them to the gills?
What are you smoking? There is no way they’d let him export Rocket engines to them, or cars. Likely for decades.
I suspect the FBI visited him after his Putin talk and reminded him that they could make him register as a foreign agent, or go to jail for that. Not that anyone would say anything.
Of course he’s going to do what he defaults to and knows best to try to get out of a bad deal?
Can you really say edgelording so hard you appear to be a legitimate national security threat to get out of a $44bln deal you don’t want is something that doesn’t sound typically Elon Musk?
But that wouldn't have saved him from discovery in the court case, and I've also heard rumours the SEC were already looking into him for stock market manipulation over this Twitter thing.
If the financing failed to show up through no fault of the acquirer, then yes, the acquirer could terminate and pay a $1 billion break fee. But there have been recent Delaware cases that suggest an acquirer manufacturing grounds for its lenders to refuse to fund will not excuse the acquirer’s obligation to buy the company - regardless of whatever limited termination fee is written into the contract.
They were happy for him to become a director. He balked as soon as it became clear that he'd have to pass the same background check as all the other directors. I wonder why that is?
> It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.
Like... his degrees being dodgy and having been an illegal overstayer in the 90s, which is a documented claim doing the rounds?
In retrospect, seems like a wise decision.
Companies couldn’t prove a MAC in the middle of the 08 housing crash, musk sure as hell wasn’t having screwed every legal argument he had available weeks in advance.
His options were buy now for 44 billion or buy maybe a month later for 44 billion plus whatever the court decided to tack on for hellishly bad faith dealing and arguments.
His legal team tried every truck available and even a lousy “well we said we’d buy it so they should drop the lawsuit “ play. The court saw right through and said “you get 4 weeks to buy and if not then the suit continues”
So they paid up because to claim you’re going to but then to not go through with it would have seen the most wrathfully phenomenal court proceeding in history.
Discovery was just an added bonus of embarrassment and very unlikely to be related at all. Every sound legal mind working for musk was probably screaming at him to shut up and eventually told him he was going to have to go through. The ONLY way this current situation could be worse is if he had continued to try and fight it after his last Hail Mary because that specific court exists almost solely to VERY quickly mitigate multi billion dollar deals and would absolutely make a very clear example out of anyone who thought they were too rich to touch.
Musk may be one of the most wealthy men in the world but Delaware deals with companies with MUCH higher net worth and resources constantly.
I believe the thesis is he thinks it's possible to duplicate WeChat as a ubiquitous everything-app (news, media, social media, payments, ordering in restaurants, shopping, messaging) in the West. Why someone would believe that, I don't know. I imagine thinking you could also be the owner of it might motivate believing it can happen somewhat.
I suppose the other thesis is that Twitter was horribly mismanaged and can work on far fewer resources to do more if he runs it like Space X or Tesla. That seems plausible to me though in this case it's beyond me why he thinks the actions he's taken will get him there.
I’m not sure how Twitter is helping in creating WeChat for the rest of the world.
The thing is with both OS and browser is that they are really long term efforts and I am not sure if Elon could pull that of anymore. For sure Elon from 10 years ago could, but not sure if he has the patience anymore. Same with Zuck, I don't think he has the patience for what he is trying to achieve.
News. Media - social and otherwise, payment processing, shipping, messaging.
The restaurant ordering thing is about the only box they don’t check.
Not restaurant, but they started on delivery marketplace items. I guess the former would have eventually happened.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-marketplace-and-doorda...
Even disregarding the content moderation speed run, the technical problems for Tesla and Space X are fundamentally about four things: physics, mathematics, materials technology and applied computer science. Mostly predictable. Twitter is like any other large messaging or information distribution system. Chaotic. Unpredictable. Highly adversarial.
Think about it. In a cloud of atoms, you don't get a sizable fraction trying to game the rest of them. Materials technology may be cruel, but at least it's not actively adversarial. Lithium batteries are volatile and can explode, but they don't do so out of malice.
With Twitter, EM is quickly learning that people are not that different from him. Awful. And dealing with them requires skills and knowledge that the best engineering can't cover.
Incidentally, I think EM is also finding new peers. He is on course to wreak about 40B worth of economic damage in a month, which puts him in the Truss-Kwarteng category. Quite an achievement.
That would actually make sense somewhere on social media.
I do not considered this fair, ethical or very smart. Just imagine all the tribal knowledge that just vanished. Twitter ought to hope they kept enough of the right infrastructure people around to actually keep the site up.
Yet another one of his relationships burned down and this time his ex is with a trans lady. One of his kids went to court to kick him out of her life while doing the paperwork for her name change. He's been a shitty husband and a shitty father, but instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a decent psychologist he's decided that "woke twitter" are to blame because they kicked a transphobic comedian off the site, and he's spiraled out of control since then.
He'd literally rather burn $44 billion dollars than admit that he has shortcomings. Or face a background check on his alleged university credentials.
He lives off Twitter. His fame and fortune would not be where it’s without Twitter and he very well knows it. You can label that an emotional connection or even personal. I don’t think he out right planned to buy it. One thing after another, he found himself locked into - buying it.
So Twitter of course accepted the deal, Musk (voluntarily) signed the merger agreement, and that was that - he was indeed locked into buying the company (subject to certain conditions - receipt of regulatory approvals, Twitter shareholders approving the merger, stuff like that).
This was not like hitting a lucky streak at the craps table and waking up 12 hours later with a new wife. The decision to purchase was deliberate. Doesn’t mean he didn’t develop buyer’s remorse after - he most certainly did - but the threatened tender offer, the rich, target-friendly merger agreement - this is exactly how you aggressively and deliberately pursue ownership of a big public company.
It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor.
Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website.
Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.
Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue
If your products are just BUILT using technology, well then you may consider yourself in another business. Whether that is a clothing, cars, pharmaceutical, weaponry or social media platforms (sorted by increasing potential for harm ;)
Still, even if you're in the last category, it may be fair to consider it "tech" if the main challenges/differentiating factors in creating the product is scienc/engineering/technological rather than for instance design, marketing or organizational efficiency.
Bingo. Hard-core engineering has been the lynchpin of Tesla and SpaceX's success -- they literally won via designing and manufacturing superior physical things.
It makes sense that EM would blunder by attempting to reproduce that type of success at Twitter. And it will be a blunder, unless: (a) he plans to build one or more new products (or drastically change the nature of the existing product), and (b) those new or drastically changed products will somehow "win" in a big way that Twitter isn't winning now.
But at least to me, (a) doesn't seem likely and (b) seems even less likely.
BMW i4 - 365 miles
Ford Mustang Mach-E - 379 miles
BMW iX - 380 miles
Mercedes EQE - 384 miles
Mercedes EQS 450+, 640km, €106,307
Tesla Model S Plaid, 540km, €140,995
Mercedes EQE 350+, 525km, € 79,850
Tesla Model 3 LR DM, 485km, € 60,995
BMW i4 eDrive40, 470km, € 60,630
VW ID.3 Pro S 5Seats 450km, € 43,720
https://ev-database.org/#sort:path~type~order=.erange_real~n...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrify_America#History
VW only did this because they were forced to. It's no mystery why traditional ICE manufacturers would be dragging their feet to modernize.
https://ionity.eu/en/ionity/who-we-are
Europe has standardized on CCS Type 2 Combo for charging. Any CCS EV can charge on any CCS charging network. Teslas can charge on Ionity, BMWs can charge on Tesla chargers, charging networks like FastNed, BP, GridServe, EnBW, Circle K and friends can charge all brands, etc.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y33AArvMUQ
If I want to go down to John Day national monument in eastern Oregon, things are even worse. Things will get better (oh, and we want to do a trip to Anchorage someday...).
The Mach-E and ix are both a little better than they look though. The ix actually does amazingly well on range tests.
and yet I know more female Tesla owners than male
Beyond that, comparisons get more complicated, but there are still perks to the 3/Y. For example, the Ioniq 5 and EV6 charge faster but have less real world range at highway speeds. In practice, this negates most of their charging advantage.
If you want the best EV sedan for road tripping in the US right now, there is nothing lower price and also better than the 3 LR.
Impressive engineering is always about details.
If you want to argue that there is really nothing superior about Tesla's engineering that's fine, but you can't shove implementation details under the rug when it suits you. For there to be nothing superior in their engineering there must also be no implementation detail that is superior.
Heck, even Audi A.G. that you've mentioned (not close to being the biggest car company) is comparable to Tesla numbers-wise.
In many industries it's not the first movers that get the market, it's the big mature market-friendly solutions (sort of how the iPod wasn't the first commercial mp3 player).
It's not like people want them to optimize for acceleration anyway...
Ten years ago Tesla was much better ride than any other premium segment car.
That said, even today Tesla EV sales dwarf Audi, so the figurative Tesla lunch remains uneaten. That's what you have for playing catch-up.
Right now EVs make up such a minimal percentage of the car market that they aren't making a meaningful dent in ICE demand, but once they hit 10% or more, car companies that don't have a slice of that segment are going to be feeling it financially. I expect there will be major casualties in the car business because of failure to get into the EV market fast enough.
I had a lecture about electric mobility last semester where a tech lead (don't want to dox them) from Daimler's electric truck program and a tech lead from Daimler's electric car program were invited. In regards to electric trucks things seem to be going great but the electric car program had massive problems with Tesla. The person in question was very hyped about the competition but admitted they got beat with the previous gen cars and that they had to completely redesign their processes to be quicker since Tesla is constantly updating their models. They were hoping to be slightly better than Tesla this gen and to get ahead next gen. So in summary I'd say that didn't turn out great for them.
>It's not like people want them to optimize for acceleration anyway...
The many YouTube views of teslas beating sports cars would beg to differ. If people didn't want acceleration everyone would be driving an 80HP hatchback or a 120-160HP SUV.
If they started earlier they would have been able to earn some of that money that went to Tesla, could have ironed out the issues while EVs were still considered in something like an open beta where owners had a lot more tolerance for issues and their processes would have become more agile naturally due to the competition with Tesla. Not to mention they could have improved their image as a luxury EV manufacturer by being one of the first.
You can even see the panic about being late to the game on Daimler's part. Their first gen EVs was made using ICE chassis which logically could not compete with cars designed from the ground up to be electric.
The only one that I dislike within Audi is the Q4 etron. Its too close to the id4, IMO.
Think about all the Chinese manufacturers, that for years were churning out the butts of jokes. How many of those would have survived in an actual competitive market?
I'm not a musk fan boy, but what he did with Tesla is impressive.
Compared to the company they were buying chassis from (lotus). If someone took lotus to the size of Tesla in less than 2 decades, would you not say that's impressive?
Starting a boutique sports car manufacturer is 'relatively' easy. Making a global car company, not so much.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Compare that with VW, how many electric cars they are making, and how long did the biggest auto-manufacter in Germany (not a bad country for Engineering standards) took to get factories ready for EVs?
I personally don't like Teslas that much, I think they got a lot of things wrong, but the manufacturing process engineering really is leading the whole car industry by quite a ways.
Check out MunroLive's teardown videos on YouTube where they talk about the changes to part counts, castings, fasteners, and all the internal details that consumers don't notice.
I’d prefer to buy a Toyota
Tesla may or may not succeed in appealing to the late majority and laggards, but if they don’t, the Toyota you buy in 15 years will still have benefitted from the industry changes Tesla is leading today.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
For example, both Lucid and Rivian use round cells for batteries. BMW is exploring the 4680 form factor. Most other manufacturers still do not use round cells.
Tesla is using large castings for major parts of the frame. I think Volvo is starting to do this? Its not entirely a new trend, but again, Tesla was the first in the auto industry to do it this way.
The way Tesla does the structural pack for the 4680 is unique as well at the moment.
Having said that, I think Tesla people overstate the customer significance of all of these things. The real impact is technically interesting, but isn't really making a big difference in the outcome of the vehicles.
There are other EVs that charge faster and are significantly cheaper too, now that Tesla keeps raising prices.
But sure, how about:
- Model years. Have you seen the 2022 Tesla Model 3? No, because it doesn't exist. Teslas evolve over time. Other manufacturers still have days where the next model year starts being produced and the cars are very different than the previous day.
- Greatly simplified cabin. I hate this, but I think it's the future.
- OTA software updates. Some other makers are doing small updates a bit, but nobody (let alone everybody) is doing what Tesla is here
-
People who like Tesla and people who hate it both seem prone to making declarations about how different it is that seem unfounded to me.
The auto industry underwent a long evolution to regimented model years, and they still make changes in between to this day. Framing a lack of model years as progress rather than regress by ~a half century seems arbitrary to me.
When cars are recalled, it isn't uncommon for the population to be defined as a range of serial numbers. The fact that recalls aren't always based on model years seems like pretty good evidence that changes are made in between, doesn't it?
So, no tactile buttons.
>OTA software updates
So Tesla has revolutionized two things that I think should be illegal in a vehicle. Awesome.
I'll add a very cavalier and dangerous "self-driving" that can't actually drive itself to the list of Tesla counter-innovations.
I appreciate the direction they pushed the industry towards, but I feel like the innovation has finished and I'd expect a lot of the problems to be ironed out.
Toyota on the other hand have produced a car which runs on hydrogen, it is in production and for sale in the USA right now. They also do hybrids and I'm sure if they wanted to, they'd do electric no problems.
American automotive manufacturing became hyper-conservative over time. A willingness to let (non-safety-critical (1)) bugs get to market with the tradeoff of making products you otherwise wouldn't is a market-distinguishing tradeoff.
(1) But my larger concern is that I can't say about Tesla that only non-safety-critical bugs are making it out the door, so I also won't buy one. Because unlike a buggy phone or buggy smart watch, a buggy car with safety-critical bugs can kill other people, so there's wisdom in disallowing it.
Why... unions. Japanese Manufacturers have evaded the UAW problem, where Ford and GM have had to flee the nation to get out from under decades of sunk costs
Tesla was not the first EV sold in the US. Earlier attempts by the established manufacturers were curiosities at best. And now that Tesla proved that EVs can actually be good, and can be made profitable, those established manufacturers are willing to move into that market.
So, no, it's not about engineering, it's about taking the risk and committing to expanding the market.
The iMiev preceded the Tesla and sold better in many part of the world because it was a more decent proposal.
What Tesla did was making greenwashing and wasting energy with electricity dfast and cool. It is probably better than wasting with ICE in nuclear powered countries but that is not what the world need right now or ever.
But he actually did change the narrative today. Yesterday, he had to make Twitter better.
Now, if Twitter doesn't crash and the World Cup goes by without a hitch, it's going to be the biggest win ever for him, is it not?
EDIT: fixed tone.
I won't be surprised if he churns through a bunch of different ideas: Subscriptions, Deals with news companies, short form videos + creator tools, different kinds of ad experiences, the edit button, better spam filtering etc.
There's a lot of potential things Twitter could be doing if they didn't limit themselves to their core product.
I don't think (b) is unlikely. Their current product is already highly valuable. You don't need their short form video product to succeed in a way TikTok did but there's enough of an audience to capture there to improve the company's valuation.
On the other hand, exactly that development towards super-apps makes it even more important that we push for decentralization.
Not to mention that the US is already reigned by mono- and oligopolies in many markets, it is also a privacy disaster.
Many nations, especially in Asia, have little awareness of the concept of privacy. and thus its consequences, so it isn't surprising such offers took off so swiftly there.
I’m not sure anything Elon says about the current or future state of Twitter has any credibility. It seems like the company is now being directed via stream of consciousness at this point.
Giant, bloated organizations (and projects, and other things) can often be helped by reduced-size, highly-directed streams of consciousness suddenly making unilateral changes to them.
One way to term it— and there are many— is crisis restructuring. Whether Twitter was actually in crisis, and whether the unilateral stream of consciousness doing the restructuring is ”divinely inspired,” remains to be seen.
Certainly paid enough for the privilege
Even if Musk somehow learns to stop live-tweeting his trial-by-fire, the damage might be done: natural iterations on business plans and features will play into a by now near-universal stereotype of Musk as some sort of shoot-from-the-hip madman, which will deter business partners from committing.
(Like, if I'm Fox News or the NY Times, do I want to commit to publish on Musk's new platform when tomorrow he might get stoned and decide to offer hosting to the Daily Stormer? Or, if I'm Bank of America, do I want to commit to consumer payments when tomorrow Musk might pivot his "super app" to offering video shorts instead?)
Again, maybe I'm living in a bubble, but Musk's reputation seems like a huge impediment to, like, doing this. At all. Ever.
If you look at Ariane V, Atlas V or Delta IV, they all have some peculiarities and operational warts. Large solid rockets, Russian engine, hydrogen. In some sense, Falcon 9 is the most "ordinary" of the launchers available now.
Well, we generally consider social media companies tech companies. And since they don't really have anything else other than the tech stack (and the users on it, but they don't "have" those), not sure as what you would characterise it.
> ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running
What makes you think that the desired engineering improvements are about "keeping [the] website running"?
It seems to me that what is being sought are engineering solutions to, for example, stop the spread misinformation without censorship. That would be pretty cool, I think. And I can imagine a way of pulling it off, because we actually have such mechanisms in the (non-internet) social networks that make up what Jonathan Rauch calls The Constitution of Knowledge.[1]
These mechanisms use network effects to amplify good information and attenuate (but not censor) bad information. What is good and bad? The network decides this by what information it attenuates or amplifies. Bad scientific papers don't get cited, good ones do. The stories in the National Enquirer don't get picked up by other papers, and nobody believes them to be true.
This obviously isn't perfect, but it's about as good as it's gonna get, and works pretty well in practice.
Internet social media disrupted these mechanisms by its extreme virality, which seems to apply specifically to bad information. It just spreads extremely fast, literally exponentially (not the "very large" meaning of "exponential"). Kind of like a virus.
And we learned recently that to suppress a viral pandemic, completely 100% sterilising immunity is not actually needed. You just need to slow it down enough to get the R number below 1, ideally significantly below 1. That's what I think the "Do you want to read the article first before retweeting?" prompts are for: slow things down a bit.
Of course "slowing things down a bit" is counter to your economic self-interest and fiduciary responsibility when you're an ad-driven company. So getting off ads completely or at least partly is an important part of it.
> Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product
Who thinks that? Why do you believe that anyone thinks this? While I don't agree with Elon's approach, the causation would clearly be the other way around: there is a lot of engineering to do to get to a better product (less dependent on ads, more attenuation of bad information without censorship etc.). And all that has to be done while under a bit of pressure, this ain't a Greenfield project with unlimited runway. So yeah, might get a bit "hardcore".
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Knowledge-Jonathan-Rauch...
Consider where the bulk of the revenue comes from and you’ll find out what industry the company is actually in.
Both FB and Google have really successful systems for this, and it insulates them massively from brand safety concerns. It appears that Twitter never invested in this (which is kinda insane tbh), and hence the large brand advertisers have a lot more power over them.
The stated goal is exactly to get away from that...
Though, whatever approach you have in discovery, or ranking posts, you're having an impact on your users, and promote a certain dynamic, no? I imagine their next approach won't be the equivalent of letting go of the steering wheel, just maybe not mindlessly chasing the same metrics as they are currently.
Maybe that's a little too social psych to call tech/engineering, but I imagine the data science that would support that would be quite exciting.
Facebook and Google are generally considered tech companies.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+facebook+tech+companies&t=o...
And of course the current attempt is to not have advertising be the primary income source.
You can buy a jet or a rocket, but you can't buy a Twitter or a Facebook. You can't even hire part of their stack. (FB has content deals and APIs for advertisers and marketers, but not - so far as I know - direct access to the servers.)
Which is why AWS is a tech company. But Amazon is an online store that happens to use tech.
It's like saying book publishers are really just printers, or FedEx is really an airline and truck driving company.
Some publishers do indeed do their R&D for print operations and logistics. But they're still primarily content houses. Any engineering that happens is a means to a productive end, not a product in itself.
Doesn't matter what you sell, or service you offer, but if you're leveraging technology to add large numbers of users with a marginal increase in cost, I see that as a tech company.
This generally means there is an internal focus on the technology itself as any improvement can have a direct link to a user's LTV.
But maybe I'm talking less tech company, and more tech led organisation..
Buzz. Not only do they "have" them, those users are literally the product the social media companies market and sell
1. Only if you are very sloppy with the meaning of the word "to have", which I wasn't.
> those users are literally the product the social media companies market and sell
2. No, they don't "have" those users. They have some of those users' attention, for as long as they can keep it. Not the same thing.
3. And once again, that is exactly the business model Twitter under Elon is trying to get away from, because it is driving the toxicity.
I really don't think this is an engineering problem. If I was a tech lead and a product manager came up to me with this, I'd tell them they need to figure out what they mean before they start talking to engineers. Software-Development is not concerned with the nature of truth and misinformation, it is concerned with what works given precise goals. Nobody in engineering school or at an engineering job gets taught or learns what counts as misinformation and how to assess it: you need people with humanities expertise for this.
The "Do you want to read..." prompts are actually a good example of what I mean, because the engineering that goes into making those is quite trivial. But the idea of using them, trying to make them effective at their goal, and determining how much they're working, these are all things that fall outside of engineering, and have more to do with product-design and sociology.
Creating a feature is not as important as getting people to use it, and use it the right way.
Based on the features Elon has rolled out so far (Twitter Blue), it seems to me they're putting more emphasis on just building it, rather than figuring out how people will use it and whether it will be beneficial
As someone is reported to have been asked in a Twitter job interview, when a celebrity with 10,000,000 followers sends out a tweet, how do you deliver them all within 3 seconds?
It's kind of tragic the amount of engineering talent wasted on non-problems at social media websites.
Earthquakes are so far outside of my life experience that I'd completely forgotten about them.
It's used for notifying residents of earthquake, tsunami, and other disaster risks. Residents in japan for most immediate disasters will hear an alert through the national system (via phones, TV, radio, etc) and on top of that residents can check the NERV twitter or other sources to determine what degree of threat it is and what the next best course of action is.
IMHO J-alert is for the first second and NERV is for the seconds after.
EDIT: Apparently they did some sort of cross promo deal with 3.0+1.0 after existing for a few years, so Khara is aware of them so they must have some sort of agreement to use that name and logo
Phones have built-in support for emergency messages (that bypass all normal silences and notification hiders, unless you explicitly go into settings and disable emergency message support), and carriers are required by law to broadcast such messages to everyone in range.
Twitter is a niche social network (at least in most of the world) and even of those that use it, a huge number will have various forms of disabled notifications.
I personally am rarely on Twitter but it used to be an invaluable resource when you're in an area and don't really have time for a fully fleshed out news article to come out the next day about what's going on on the ground. Block club Chicago was tweeting and retweeting videos of police beating up protesters that night a couple blocks from my apartment in 2020, well ahead of the articles that came out the next day.
It was also interesting to see in real time an active disinformation campaign materialize and disappear that same day. Up until around 1 AM there were a lot of people posting about how the "Proud Boys" were planning to show up or had shown up and encouraging people to bring weapons, then all initial tweets were deleted late at night, with only screen shots or people who had quoted them still being available on the site. But that was a problem I hope would be fixed instead of the removal of the checks to make it all in to a shit show.
I'm just pointing out a limited fact - that the 3s limit is not relevant even for emergency situations, as no one does or should rely on emergency tweets.
Hire The Flash then it's "just" a traveling salesman problem which is left to solve by the reader.
(celebrity just means subscribed by >X people)
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...
I'd imagine "shard the servers serving the subscription to users, accessing sharded database/queue of new tweets" would get you close. Much easier to do with established software now than when twitter was created tho.
Yes like Instagram and others. It was not tech stack that was sold but community of users. I guess Musk's lenders knows this.
That's not a "tech startup" based on "hardcore engineering", that's a startup based on a social idea and implemented with some trivial tech.
Scaling this to hundreds of millions is not exactly a "hardcore engineering" thing either. Mostly regular engineering with some good practices (like share nothing) and devops. Tons of companies do just the same, today you can even do it from your bedroom by building on top of AWS, GAE, etc, there are even templates for this...
No, I don't.
My point is their initial success years (which wasn't that off the current product) wasn't some hardcore engineering feat: just a cruder-than-average Rails app.
Whatever their stack looks now is irrelevant.
https://mobile.twitter.com/danluu/status/1592774269733601281
This growth impacted every rails app back then, the popular ones more quickly is all..
“How to build a Super App” is not that complicated, from an engineering perspective. It does requires hard work, especially if you want to build it fast.
But the big problem is not really how to build it as much as how to make it successful: how to make people use your app over other ones they already use. There are apps like Venmo and WhatsApp that cover WeChat’s use cases pretty well, why should people switch to Twitter?
Step one would probably be to get people to trust your app. I don’t think the latest developments at Twitter make it seem particularly trustworthy
As for the hard to quantify work, Elon needs people he can trust. Even if the existing people are good, they can not be trusted. Committing to something like Twitter 2 is as good an oath as it gets. The other alternative is to just fire everyone he did not hire himself.
I remember the dread that must be dealing with their process load when I get to a whale page, not when I'm tweeting successfully.
Anyway, the thing here is that since EM wants to enact that much change in a short time frame as possible, and guessing he's likely to make mistakes along the way, he'll need engineering work as hard as possible.
> if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas
And Uber is a tech company because its a taxi service with an app.
And Airbnb is tech company because its a house renting company with an app.
etc.
Have you ever used Twitter?
To someone who has used Twitter in the past weeks this reads like deliberate trolling.
Twitter was absolutely terrible to use and the pace of noticible change within days/weeks under Elon is mind blowing to me. He's clearly going fast with things like getting rid of (shadow-)banning for no apparent reason, getting rid of banning anything of a certain political flavor, making Twitter faster (both in browser as well as on Android), getting rid of fake scammer accounts who deliberately impersonated famous people and companies to scam people, getting rid of bots and spam which where a HUGE problem (still are until the transition to verified is done) and so on.
I mean getting rid of politically flavored sensorship alone will have a massive impact globally for something like Twitter. That alone was obviously very terrible to many people before Musk.
PS: since you said you don't understand what his vision is. My best guess: it's to create a platform that competes with click-bait sponsored propaganda journalism. In the form of citizen journalism on Twitter. I think it could work and I also think there's a huge need for it as traditional journalism is dead in my opinion.
(He thinks this is happening because he reads his replies and a lot of cranks convinced they're shadow banned are @ing him.)
> getting rid of fake scammer accounts who deliberately impersonated famous people and companies to scam people
(He made it worse and the big advertisers canceled their campaigns after their stock falling due to fake announcements.)
All this is really because he doesn't really understand his business - what he's selling is access to Twitter's user's attention .... and he's alienated them all because he thinks it's all about technology
The entire and obvious and openly stated point of Musk buying Twitter was to reinstate Trump, and re-inflict his regular unhinged sociopathic tweets and lies and misinformation and calls to violence and bullying and hate speech and racism upon everyone in the world again, just when we were all getting used to enjoying not hearing from him every single fucking day and the middle of the night.
There's no other rational explanation, and although that obvious explanation may sound completely irrational, so is Musk, and it is still the real reason, and the inextricable consequence, just as predicted by Occam's Razor, and foretold by Musk's own words.
There's nothing bewildering about it at all, so stop acting so surprised, and pretending he changed his mind after what he said so emphatically and unambiguously.
It's not like it's a secret, or contested. He openly announced it. When people show you who they are and what they'll do, believe them.
https://www.voanews.com/a/elon-musk-says-he-d-reinstate-trum...
>Elon Musk Says He'd Reinstate Trump's Twitter Account
>"I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump," Musk said. "I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice."
>Musk added that Trump's ban was "morally wrong and flat-out stupid."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/28/twitter-d...
>Twitter braces for Donald Trump’s return as Elon Musk takes over platform
>Hate speech and misinformation experts are bracing for the return of Donald Trump to the platform, as Elon Musk completes his acquisition of Twitter.
They'll have to go 'hardcore' just to stand still.
Hardcore engineering may be needed to pivot and get to profitability.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/what-is-an-everything-app...
There is no opportunity to "go hardcore" for the kind of devs that build greenfield crap at lightning speed and leave spaghetti in their wake.
Elon appears to intend to slice and dice his way to profitability like a textbook MBA. In order to support that there is opportunity for architects, engineers and process specialists who are skilled at hacking existing stuff together to make square pegs fit in round holes well enough to work and with minimal expenditure of engineering man hours. There are few of these people because it's not a skillset that the traditional software engineering trade really values and pushes people toward and fewer still who fit that category and want to work 50+hr weeks, and fewer still because pre-Elon Twitter isn't the kind of place these people thrive and so most would have self-selected out.
This is a death march - no question about it. The book by Edward Yourdon should be required reading for any who are still at Twitter.
One of the things that is in the book had in it that I recall was a four quadrant grid of 'morale' and 'likelihood of success'(?).
There are indeed high morale high chance of success death marches - and they can be fun to be on. The "we will get this done and it will be glorious" type things.
There are also the low morale high chance of success that just drag on and it is a "we will get this done, and then we will all quit." I've been on that one - it was awful. I can only imagine the low morale low chance ones being completely dreadful and people hoping that it gets canceled before too much longer.
Amazon says that I got a copy of this on August 11th, 2012... and that was an order in which the book I got was given to my manager at the time. The project rolled out in October (before Black Friday code freezes went in effect) and I started looking for new employment in January after the company did its yearly bonuses.
Well, we know where we're goin'
But we don't know where we've been
And we know what we're knowin'
But we can't say what we've seen
And we're not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out
"We're on the one road. It may be the wrong road. But we're together so who cares!"
"I'm on the one road. It may be the wrong road. But I'm alone so who cares!"
I am going to use this fixed version for my own purposes.
We, the unwilling
Led by the unknowing
Are doing the impossible
For the ungrateful
We have done so much
For so long
With so little
We are now qualified
To do anything
With nothing
I try to keep the same name/idenity-ish across systems. It was originally a collision of names (three people on the team all had the same first name). One got the short form, one the long form, and the Scoobie Do movie had just come out and for some reason, I got "Shaggy". A bit later, had a coworker who was Japanese and my first name is awkward to say to the Japanese sounds, but "shaggy" is fine - except that it was pronounced as "SHA-gie" which turned out to be much less taken as a user name than the traditional form, so I use it where I can.
That order also had Slack and Peopleware by Tom DeMarco (which I'll also recommend).
These are things that are timeless (though Peopleware is on a 3rd edition).
Death marches are often software projects, but I've seen some lawyers on a "death march" case where its dragging on and on.
The ideas of Slack are applicable to every job - though especially those of knowledge workers (the book is likely as good for building architects as it is for software developers). Similar things about productivity and desk space are also true for architects and software developers.
They're good books and interesting things to read... but they're not books about software development as software.
And for the right financial upside. I completely understand going hardcore at a startup in which you have equity. But hasn't Twitter going private removed a lot of the incentive for employees? What is the upside for a Twitter engineer dedicating themselves to the company? Making one of the richest people on the planet slightly richer?
Just one of the wealthiest people in history asking people to work 12 hour days every day of the week, forever, for some nebulous reasons that he can't state, just because.
Such a radical renegotiation of the employment agreement between the workers and the management requires a LOT of study and time. Not two days and clicking a button that says you agree to something.
You'd be crazy to agree to this, and Elon would be crazy to think that anyone that did click is doing anything but trying to find another job while at work.
Haha, can someone tweet this at him so he sees it. He thinks he'll be getting dedicated loyal employees (let's deem them the Yes-clickers), but if he becomes aware of this flaw in his plan, he's going to treat them with paranoia and mistrust as well.
I really munch popcorn hope he twigs that soon.
"a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is"
Part of the deal of going "hardcore" working at a startup is that you get a small chance of becoming rich. I don't think working 80 hrs/wk is worth it when the upside is adding an extra 20% or whatever onto your salary.
"How many people still working at Twitter hated all the woke crap like banning Nazis and were practically begging some conservative billionaire to buy the site, fire everyone, and turn it into an extremely successful free-speech Libertarian playground like Parler or Truth Social?"
Those are the only people who would willingly take his offer. Almost everyone else working there now has a job mobility problem, but the moment that problem gets solved, they're out.
Some businesses do just fine with employees that don't really want to work there, but they typically have enormous hiring funnels running 24/7/365 to handle the churn. Like McDonalds or Amazon's warehouses. Twitter doesn't have that, and you won;t find it at PayPal, Tesla, or SpaceX.
Interviewee: "What's my upside here?"
Elon: "RSUs in this illiquid private company."
Interviewee: "Under what circumstances do they become liquid?"
Elon: "We have to first make money above and beyond paying this crushing debt, then we have to have a growth story to sell to the public, then we go public, then you wait out the employee lockout period, and if you're still an employee, you can sell your RSUs."
Interviewee: "So, like, 2-5 years of sleeping in the office to win Survivor Twitter and not get fired, plus I have to depend upon you to steer us to profitability."
Elon: "Exactly. And when it comes to profitability, my favourite tactic is firing people like you."
I would say for me working hard at startups was mostly because I enjoyed the technical challenge, the culture, and the team I was working with. And I was paid pretty well. I placed $0 value on my equity (and for me that's also what it ended up being worth).
The point is there's other forms of variable compensation beside options you can give to employees of a private entity that are just as good (or even better) than options that may or may not become liquid over 7-10 years. Twitter could set up something similar to entice top performers to stay.
And as much good a pubic soapbox platform could have been for society, destroying the company seems to me to be the only appropriate karmic justice for all involved, including society because of what Twitter had become and had been used for politically.
And there’s an upside. If the people threatening to leave actually do, it will likely make the platform better.
People talk about like it a critical major industry is about to go under.
It’s Twitter. If it goes under it’ll be missed as much as MySpace.
I feel bad for all those who are on visas though and may not have the flexibility to accept the severance offer.
I know people joked about him wanting to destroy it, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that that's the only rational explanation for what he's doing. Even Dilbert's PHB seems mild compared to Musk. Either he's a massive idiot, or he wants to destroy Twitter without looking like he intended to destroy it, and so prefers to look like a massive idiot instead.
For a certain kind of engineer, this version of Twitter is far more attractive than the previous one.
There is a difference between critiquing your employer or insulting your employer. Try insulting your employer on Slack or Twitter and see how it goes.
From https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/technology/elon-musk-twit... :
"Several Twitter employees who shared news of Mr. Frohnhoefer’s firing in internal chats were cut, said six people familiar with events. They were told that they had been terminated for “violating company policy,” according to emails seen by The Times."
Is there a difference between "insulting your employer" and "sharing the publicly-verifiable actions of your employer"? Elon's trying to spin this as "insubordination" when in truth he's just trying to quash any and all dissent, like the authoritarian he is.
Quashing such dissent is good and perfectly in line with his responsibility as CEO. Office gossip and politics doesn't serve a purpose other than distraction and disruption - especially when conducted in private chats.
https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159297764564540211...
this is something that was talked well before Elon, they have thousands upon thousands engineers, for a plafromt that had a fixed set of features since forever.
I don't claim that twitter could be run by the smart cousing from it's basement, but the effort/result numbers seem way off from here.
I think everyone is conveniently setting this topic aside in the ferwor to pile up on Elon (whom actions I don't defent in any way, shape or form) but something in that area was in need of a correction for a while, and apparently the whole stack is politicized enough than steering the ship would have been challenging irregardless by whom would have taken such task.
Twitter was definitely poorly managed, had no vision, and the engineers were probably closing lots of tickets with well written and documented and smart code. The problem is that if the tickets being created are stupid, no amount of "hardcore engineering" can fix that. You can't fix "draw a red line using this blue pen" with better coders.
If you actually care about twitter (you shouldn't), what it needed was a plan to make people hate it less, since even the people who use it constantly seem to hate it, and a strategy to make things more reliable and cheaper, essentially pay off all the tech debt they accrued by doing everything before it was done. But that would have required a massive undertaking, and public companies generally hate that kind of thing, and would rather slowly die over decades than make things better by spending a couple bucks up front.
None of that makes walking in, shitting on everyone's keyboard, pissing off everyone that could be talented, firing lots of people seemingly randomly or off the cuff, and saddling the company with a bunch of new debt they no longer have revenue streams for because your stupid feature idea was predictably stupid, a smart or correct or laudable action.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196
2. https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-re...
I don't think a rational person would try to make any long term conclusions from less than a month of new ownership.
Twitter was built on shaky foundations. From the very earliest days, the "fail whale" was a recurring theme
For comparison:
Meta / Facebook:
* React
* PyTorch
* Fasttext
* Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program
Google:
* Flutter
* Go
* Kubernetes
* Tensorflow
* BERT / Large language models generally
* Mapreduce / Hadoop
The much-maligned Uber:
* H3 Geospatial indexing
* Kepler.gl
* Manifold
Even AirBNB!
* Airflow
* Superset
I use most of these products (or their descendants) every day in my work. When I think of Twitter, all I think of is how they arbitrarily shut off humanitarian access to their APIs (and earlier, the Twitter firehose). There's not a single Twitter-supported open product that I use.
Am I the only one? Is there a great Twitter-supported project that I missed?
It’s the only one I could think of but it certainly had a big impact on lots of people, enabling a lot of devs who were bad at design and responsiveness to make halfway decent looking websites.
I'm pretty sure almost all of this team was laid off (certainly the people I knew who worked on it were).
> * Airflow
This is actually a clone of an internal FB tool (written by the same author after he left FB).
That's really sad news. The crew I interacted with (Alex, Omari, Tobias, others) were top-flight engineers who also really understood the problem space and how to navigate the internal complexities of Meta. Hope the laid off / repositioned staff are OK, and if they're looking for new opportunities my email's in my profile.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23465274/hundreds-of-twi...
Twitter no longer has a communications department to contact for comment.
They have no money. It’s not coming in, and only gets worse when the site goes down.
They’re facing employment lawsuits over the last two weeks. They’re facing a discrimination lawsuit for requiring an employee with an ADA accommodation to work from home to work from the office (after that announcement).
The FTC is mad. Congress is mad. Who knows what other lawsuits/etc will pop up.
I just don’t understand how they can survive. Seems like chapter 7. Not “renegotiate the debt and we swear we’ll be fine” chapter 11. Sell every last post-it note and auction off the wall art to pay the creditors chapter 7.
I knew he’d ruin Twitter. I never expected anything like this. I expected people to slowly leave (platform and employment) due to new policies and values.
This was, and honestly is, unimaginable.
Did he really destroy $44B in three weeks?
Source? Musk claimed a "massive drop" but who knows how much that is, if he exaggerated for effect or whether it's permanent ("paused" doesn't mean permanent, if it makes financial sense advertisers will return).
> I expected people to slowly leave
Yet number of users increased faster than ever. These kinds of predictions reminds me of the expectations that Trump would be prosecuted any day now thorough out his whole presidency.
Maybe Twitter will crash and burn, maybe Musk has absolutely no idea what he's doing, or maybe generally outraged people are bad at predicting the future because they're easily misled by their general dislike of someone's personality.
Source on this? I've seen reports that the number of "monetizable daily active users" is up, but nothing about the actual user count.
Someone responded with a graph whose Y axis started at 0. You couldn’t see the “massive jump” anymore.
It was actually like 0.5% increase based on the data in Elon’s chart.
Elon: hold my beer.
In 2017, USCIS unilaterally enacted a 60-day grace period as an administrative rule, which is still in effect today. But, given the current US job market in tech, 60 days may not be sufficient.
Twitter aside, it should also be noted that, being an administrative rule, it can be changed fairly easily for political reasons, since it doesn't have to go through Congress, and courts generally err on the side of executive agencies' judgment on such matters.
I agree "fuck him", but sadly I doubt he'll suffer much of a fallout of this.
That said I am riding the sweet wave of schadenfreude and do hope that twitter crashes and burns (and that everyone who works there gets severance)
Yikes.
Single-handedly except for, ya know, all the people that actually designed and built the cars at Tesla
based on his actions to date, the only explanation I can think of is he wants to destroy it
He has no STEM degree at all!
The implication is that EM did.
Apparently there was a memo sent to everyone in tech that they have to completely discount his work at Tesla and SpaceX and only evaluate him based on his tweets.
I feel like I'm living in bizarro world where overnight, Elon Musk became a dumbass - at least in the eyes of the tech industry.
I reckon you also think the Kardashian family is "dumb" because of their public persona.
It will be interesting to see how things go now the free money tap is turned off for the casino stock market
That's also a genius, just of another kind.
Absurd to suggest that it was just luck or grift that helped him make multiple $100B companies.
He said several times he wants to make it into a western Wechat equivalent, very dystopian with overall negative value to society and positive value for him and the government agencies.
So he's doing exactly as we all should expect, he's literally said it. I used to delete last Now I delete first.
But then again, it's Elon, so who knows.
Cut it before understanding what it does, I don't think anything good is going to come from this.
Remember, cutting off the MFA microservice ?
I strongly suspect that was a case of switching off something that few people realized was required by for MFA service to operate. That speaks to poor comms, poor docs, and poor understanding of the systems (by the people who were still around.) "Chesterton's Fence" says you shouldn't be turning off stuff you don't understand, but if it looked OK to turn it off, but it wasn't, then that's actually an indictment of the poor engineering practises that Elon claims are rampant around Twitter. Rather than showing Elon to be an idiot it might prove his point.
But we're not in Twitter, so we can't know. What I would say is that if everything was well signposted that the service was critical then I doubt Elon would have recklessly ordered it should be turned off regardless. He's not that bad. It smells of bad documentation to me.
But hey, maybe that's why I'm just an engineer without any interest of making the switch to the "leadership" ladder, and not a CEO.
So it will coast for a while before the wheels come off. Maybe performance will degrade, maybe media stops loading or your timeline won't refresh. Maybe none of that happens and a critical system deep down fails and it just stops. But Musk has all but ensured that Twitter in its current form cannot continue to function.
If he gets himself under control and stops it from downward spiraling (including losing much of their existing advertiser revenue!) then he’s making some progress.
But right now, he seems to be throwing gasoline on it.
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-...
But did he have to be so cruel? Post this picture https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592618665933156352 while 5k people lost their jobs? And all the other stuff... I mean... it's one thing to "tell it like it is", which is a trait a lot of people admire. But he's just doing a bunch of stuff that deep down only abominable human beings would think and let alone act on it.
There's an increasingly blunt divide these days between people who think cruelty is a good signal because it's in some way "realistic", and people who think avoidable suffering is bad and should be avoided. This is almost exactly the "woke"/"antiwoke" split.
This might map with the idea how the military first needs to break a person to rebuild them in something that's capable of doing what society has taught us to never do (namely, kill others), and more strongly to what I've been increasingly hearing lately in the business world which is "antifragility".
In no way I am equating killing with building resilient systems, but I can see a thread connecting them when someone thinks that cruelty can produce better and improved new behaviors or systems.
Word on the street is full teams (including most of infra) have clicked "no". He may be in a state where the site can't even stay up as he coasts on employee fumes.
50% layoffs gets them back to their 2018 headcount.
As far as I can remember, Twitter was functioning fine in 2018 as well. And it certainly didn't grow enough or add enough features to warrant 50% headcount increase in two pandemic years.
Remember that some people willingly put themselves through extremely situations - obsctacle races, bootcamps, etc. 80hrs/week doesn't bother them. Work-life balance isn't something they care about. The David Goggins types.
Elon has built his career seeking out such people. Couple all of this "hardcore" talk with some elaborate BS about "Twitter's mission" (and he IS an excellent hype man) and I can totally see certain type of engineers jumping through hoops just to get in.
Why do you consider that "unfortunate"?
What is 'social debt' and how is it (objectively) measured?
But it’s a real thing. Qualitatively it is the impairment from people not wanting to do business with you. In Twitter’s case, that manifests as decreased advertiser demand, which results in lower ad prices.
And to the extent Twitter is losing MAU, that impacts ad inventory.
Maybe it wasn’t the best analogy. Was just looking for similar “it’s real but not precisely accounted for” concepts .
Some querying on the Internet shows people discussing social debt as a software engineering concept. In that context, it seems to be parallel to the idea of technical debt but revolves around the quality of the social dynamics of a team rather than the quality of the code.
In any case, it's definitionally not objectively measurable (and I'm not sure why that would be desirable), since it's about people's perceptions and subjective experiences with each other. One can, of course, subjectively measure it.
And in general that’s the idea of social debt. That every time you ask someone to change their responsibilities, or do something against company culture, or do something against their morals, or work longer hours for no extra pay, etc: you accrue negativity in their mind associated with you. Do that enough without there being positive things to “pay off” the debt and they’ll be less motivated to work for you, quit entirely, or even sabotage you.
ESG score (Environmental, Social and Governance), it isn't measured objectively but used as a tool for political control and for parading by activists.
He was pretty clear. The bar kicked out the Nazis, and he wants them back in.
Thousands of women banned for not agreeing that men in dresses should have full access to women's spaces for one example.
I personally don't like how negative everyone has been since EM took over. The 44 billion wasn't 100% his money, he got funding, so he's still liable. And since Twitter is known for being hated, very few people have something positive to say about Twitter. I think EM making changes is good.
Of course losing your job isn't fun, but I don't think that this amount of negativity is productive or good for anyone.
Don't get me wrong, EM makes mistakes, even if he doesn't address them, like HyperLoop, which is not only practical but also not his idea. But like why not wait a bit too actually see what's his vision for Twitter, beyond just saying that he's trying to serve his ego.