An engineering culture that’s awesome at a company like that will only last until the money runs out.
I’m not supporting what Elon is doing. I’m just saying that what Twitter was doing before wasn’t sustainable or on a path to being sustainable. The culture was part of that
Not very positive! They weren’t a great business!
Then they had to pay a huge fine, and lost a bunch of money because of it.
But they weren’t operating at a loss. Certainly not “millions a day.” Where do people get that figure?
2020, they had a $1B net loss for the year. 2019, they had a $1B net gain.
I dunno, it’s clear they were a weird and not great business. But like, they weren’t JUST lighting cash on fire.
But yes, this notion that Twitter was just hemorrhaging money seems flatly false and easily disprovable. I haven't read the financial statements in a while, but when I last did I indeed saw one of the few tech companies that was actually profitable.
Is there a such thing as a person who reaches that level of wealth who isn't? Perhaps people who were born with it might not be, but it seems to be a prerequisite for people who achieve that level of wealth themselves.
It seems like cherry-picking excuses to support Musk's leadership style rather than any justified basis. If the parent comment is correct, they just aren't as profitable as Wall Street would like (therefore they are not "profitable"). Saying that the firings are justified is then just moving the goalposts to support an a-priori conviction.
Additionally, it seems ironic that this is coming from proponents of the Silicon-Valley ethos of "screw profitability, we'll figure it out later"... an ethos that created Amazon and so many other tech titans. Yes, profitability matters, but only when your other forms of capital (e.g., social, political) have been depleted.
It's tragic that Musk is depleting whatever capital twitter had remaining on its current death march. Financially "profitable" or not, twitter did undeniably have social and political capital. Soon, it will have neither.
There’s room for sincere curiosity about what’s going on and what’ll happen, but a lot of what I see online is people just relishing in the sadism of the whole ordeal.
Not sure how we escape the gravity of it.
But I read the GP to mean they've seen people crossing a thin line.
I doubt any of us are above a bit of schadenfreude when the fates deal a fair dose of karma to someone we think deserves it.
But actively cheering (and trying to multiply, in the case of aggressive trolling) the sadism in public is a kind of dark prayer.
Also, it’s very obviously not true that all the people who lost their jobs are highly paid. It’s curious how this self-deception keeps appearing among people who are cheering it on.
It’s really not a game show. There are important ideas being tested and norms being created (or destroyed).
The biggest self-own in the industry will be if Elon is successful and then the whole software industry suddenly is inspired not by (yes, perhaps excessive) kindness/comfort/generosity of a good work life but by cut throat PE-style management with an added layer of emotional manchild tantrums.
There’s a reason VCs are cheering this on and it’s because lower standards in the software industry will save them all money.
And I also see musk's compulsive lying and arrogance as harmful, althought in more limited scope.
So from my perspective it's one bad thing destroying other bad thing. What's not to be happy about ?
Sure, Twitter transforming into not a vile piece of shit it is today into something decent would also be nice outcome but I don't even know how that would work so it burning is next best thing.
* [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2022/11/14/japanese...
It is absolutely possible that Twitter turns into a 4chan-esque cesspool of vitriol and hatred but at massive scale due to a gradual frog boil of 160MM+. Not to say Twitter had none of this, but again, it takes little imagination to worry about it getting much, much worse.
Also more broadly, people quitting en-masse with new leadership attempting to make the place profitable should tell you all you need to know about the culture.
Trying to make the place profitable by firing large swaths of their coworkers. You make it sound like people started jumping overboard right when the rescue crew was on the way, rather than when a new captain took over and started trying to stop the ship from sinking by forcibly tossing people himself.
Twitter has a very long runway where > 90% of its existence it was making a loss.
Where competing social networks have exponentially grown in size (FB, Insta, Tiktok, even Reddit), Twitter has stagnated.
Twitter is widely known to never really ship anything. So I have no idea which "velocity" the author is talking about.
Before the musk take-over, a plan was already in the works to cut 800M in expenses.
May I remind you that Twitter almost went bankrupt in 2016? They tried to sell but nobody wanted it.
He isn't firing those people as a component of "leadership", he's clearly cleaning house. He doesn't _want_ the vast majority of twitter staff to remain for obvious reasons.
Now of course that was tiny minority of workers there, but there seemed to be zero that's happy about it before acquisition so the "obvious reason" is "aside from cost cutting he's kicking people that would give resistance to whatever he wants to do with twitter"
Of course if employees don't believe in leaderships vision they might not be a good fit. Of course a company looking to cut costs is going to look at trimming their workforce. This all makes sense, it just has absolutely nothing to do with free speech.
> It's tragic that Musk is depleting whatever capital twitter had remaining on its current death march. Financially "profitable" or not, twitter did undeniably have social and political capital. Soon, it will have neither.
Is it tho ? The social capital Twitter had was just used to push ideas of whoever was in charge there at the time. It was slowly becoming a propaganda machine that was disguised as social network.
Just like a week ago we had HN discussion about how after firing a bunch of people Japanese twitter suddenly stopped being so political [1], coz those topics were being forced.
Twitter dying in fiery musky fireball might be the best thing to happen in long term.
* [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2022/11/14/japanese...
Is there a difference? From what we've seen over the past couple of decades, it seems like social networks are doomed to devolve into propaganda machines.
>Twitter dying in fiery musky fireball might be the best thing to happen in long term.
That's what I feel like too.
First one is de facto popularity contest and each side is free to call on other's bullshit, if control comes from company running it the detractors from "right" vision gets silenced,either explicitly, or by just modifying algorithm to deprioritize their content
I suspect that $4m a day number Musk has been tossing around is rooted in his terrible financial investment. He purchased the company for $44b, which has something like $1.4b in interest every year? Which would be $3.8m a day.
So Twitter wasn't losing $4m a day--Musk was.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
and see that revenue is growing but it's still in the red, and obvious conclusion to that being "they hired a lot of people that don't bring that much profit"
In 2021, Twitter would have been profitable were it not for a ~$800 million legal settlement payout.
They posted a net profit in Q4 2021 and Q1 2022.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-buyout-will-load-twi...
Allowing so long for the deal to close may have been a mistake due to what happened in the market between when they agreed to terms and when the deal closed.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-21/elon-g...
This is false. Twitter was profitable in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 and its R&D budget was half that of 2022, or less, for those years and by all accounts it had a fantastic culture.
In 2021, the last year available and its very worst year since 2015, Twitter made $5 billion in revenue and lost $492 million. So your "millions of dollars a day" is not wrong-- $1.4 million per day.
Twitter spend $1.2 billion on R&D-- less than 25% of its revenue. In 2020, it spend $873 million on R&D and made a profit. In 2019, it spent a mere $682 million on R&D and made a $366 million dollar profit. Similarly in 2018.
Additionally, the incentive from wall street is to spend all your money to grow users. Whether that is right or wrong it’s the path they chose which led to users and revenue roughly doubling over 5 years.
https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar...
https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2019/Fi...