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>Twitter is just web dev stuff

"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.

> ends up selling it to Google or something for pennies

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.

He does seem to be consistently inconsistent.

>It seems far more likely to me that he ends up selling it to Google or something for pennies.

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.

No matter how big it is it's an order of magnitude less difficult than Cars or Spaceships, don't kid yourself on that. That can be evidenced with how fast they rolled out new features to twitter blue. They made some bad product decisions but the tech side went very fast.

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.

Problem is that Elon’s ego is much much much bigger than how smart he is . And the gap has been growing for last few years really fast.

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.

This is true, and it also mostly says something about his ego not about how smart he is. No humans were ever smart enough to match that ego.

That being said I think he is being overly underestimated right now. Clearly he can bring something positive based on history.

I think he's made a major mis-step with twitter though.

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.

I think more importantly probably all Twitter employees could find a similar job in 20-50 other companies in the area they live in. You cannot beat them up when there are still tons of employers willing to snap them up.

He must know this??

There a lot of tech layoffs and the market is nothing like it's been the last 15 years, so it's probably not going to be as easy as you think.

I could see working at twitter for the money or tough technical problems, but what mission could possibly convince you to work there?

It’s why he has succeeded all this time. You don’t get investments by being grounded. Privacy is regarded highly in the US which means less transparency. Take for example this: https://mobile.twitter.com/capitolhunters/status/15933075419... Shouldn’t confirming Elons university degree be extremely simple?

And if you are treated as a god for so long by your cult on Twitter, media etc then you start believing that you are one and then there is no way back until you get all the way to hell where you finally realize that you are a mere mortal and your huge ego made you a fool of yourself.

His ego really isn't what you are making it out to be. Has he ever said any of those things? In almost all the interviews he has he never talks about how smart he is, he talks about how good the engineers he works with are.

> 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.

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.

> Twitter is just web dev stuff

put it on a shirt. twitter is the .01% of web dev. what they do isn't easy and there are no right answers.

You are right that it isn't "just web dev", but at the same time the rest of the statement still holds. There's lots and lots of large-scale (mostly-)web services, and running one certainly isn't that groundbreaking anymore. If you really want to work on one, it doesn't have to be Twitter.

I imagine theres lots of groundbreaking stuff to work on at Twitter. Lots of opportunities to apply AI, do cool distributed systems research, build specialized hardware to optimize video, build new types of databases, apply computational social science (all things facebook does fyi). Its far far more than "just web dev". Now you can just stop working on your products and just hope the website stays alive but not sure its a good plan in the long run

> (all things facebook does fyi)

... that's the point of the original comment. None of this is unique to Twitter.

Its still ground breaking work...

Within the scope of an argument about the job mobility for Twitter engineers, Twitter is "just web dev stuff" or maybe "just planet-scale web dev stuff." The key point is that the skills these engineers have is valuable in many places and EM's behaviour is rapidly driving away everyone who has a reasonable chance of finding work within the next 6-12 months.

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.

Yeah they have problems that most companies don't, and a scale that most companies don't. But, web dev and scaling is not nearly as hard as car manufacturing or rocket design. Both of which are far more complex, also have a ton of software and people's lives are on the line.

> 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.

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.