The fact that Twitter is running well with headcount down significantly matters
twitter.com
twitter.com
Twitter has run well... for the past month. That's not long, even in the "what have you done for me this quarter" world of corporate earnings. And even that's too short for any sane evaluation - tons of CEOs have destroyed a business by making things look good for a year or two.
He's doing this. So far, it's worked well enough to keep the lights on and the servers up. Beyond that, it's too early to tell.
However anyone with any amount of systems experience knows that updates, bugs and new features are going to be the pain points moving forward.
"Running well" is subjective - moderation is now garbage and advertisers have left in droves, it's easy to flood the website with spam to drown out messages (as various sleeper accounts just did during the chinese covid protests) and many features that have been broken still remain broken. Judging from share price depreciation across Musk's various businesses, I'm guessing the sentiment of "everyone in SV admires Elon" is at best naive, but most likely an attempt at manipulation to address Tesla's still-tumbling share price.
Is there even anyone out there who thought the site would just stop working? The expectation isn't that the infrastructure will fail, it's that Musk will make a series of impulsive decisions that render the site either irrelevant or unable to compete with other social media platforms. So far this seems to be a pretty accurate forecast of his actions.
Yes, there were many authoritatively claiming this on here and Twitter.
The goalposts for failure will continue to move, though, and we’ll just pretend no one ever claimed those things.
The problem would be that we wouldn't have any sales, product management, design, proper support, etc. "The site literally functions" is a very low bar and not nearly enough to keep revenues where they need to be, let alone actually grow and advance the company.
Come to think of it, I have a better example. I used to work for a company (Highrise) that no longer exists - it was shut down by our parent company, and no employees are working on the product. New signups have been turned off, but it's still running and people are still using it. I can't say for certain absolutely no effort is being put into it, but I'm fairly sure it's pretty minimal, and it just keeps going. It's going to wither on the vine, but we never really had that many server issues to begin with if no one was touching anything, and so it can just kinda keep going with 0 staff.
Whether or not its business is "running well" is idle speculation at this point, since that data is private.
The CEO in the linked emails should stop wasting his time thinking about someone else's company.
If not, they already have a short- to longterm problem unless they find something in the OSS community with the same characteristics.
*) https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2014/manhattan-...
Musk mentioned cash burn was $4mm/day ($1.5bn/yr) and headcount reduction probably cuts that in half. Perhaps a sustainable business will emerge after all.
Not exactly equivalent, but I think Craigslist has like 40 employees. It's doesn't make billions in revenue like Twitter did (does?) but seems like a relevant case study.
I'm sure there's a term for this type of bias but it's not the only type that's relevant to these discussions.
So he could afford to run it for 30 years with his own money, for the equivalent hit of like buying a car would be for an ordinary person, just out of spite if he had to!
Let's put it this way, even if he went crazy with it, he'd still die a billionaire even if he gets at a hundrend years old...
Heck, Trump is still a billionaire, and he did several bunkrupties, bad investments, BS moves, and stupidity to hurt his public image there is. And he never had 1/100 of what Musk has to begin with...
Imagine if I printed 1,000,000 shares of a fictional company I owned. Then my parents bought 1 share each for $1 each. I would have a market cap of one million dollars, even though the remaining 999,998 can’t be sold anywhere.
Thus, Elon’s net worth only works if he could sell every share, for the share price it is right now. This is impossible - he would crash the stock and make a few billion dollars at most.
I do agree that they would have collapsed eventually and this is just an accelerated version of that
I think it’s like 50/50 if he succeeds or not, but I’m not at all confident Twitter’s chances are any worse than they were. They are definitely trending up the longer it goes along.
Of course I may be biased. The man did buy my small amount of a dogshit stock at a huge premium, removing it from my index investments. Twitter wasn’t going to see $54 again for a very long time, if ever.
We obviously don’t know either way, but no massive outages so far doesn’t mean Twitter is still operating smoothly.
Now with Twitter facing a new $1.2B per year in debt, servicing hitting profitability again will be a challenge.
All in all, CEOs are paid for good decisions, not necessarily hard ones.
However, personally I think the story of a platform supporting thousands of families is more interesting than a platform serving to enrich a small (and openly toxic) few
.. wasn’t Twitter operating at a net loss? So the VCs were the ones “supporting” those families… that’s a charity LARPing as a functional business
But saying they are running well with the head count down is just not known.
Are the people who remain all killing themselves to keep everything running? If so that is not sustainable.
Are systems running in spite of the down headcount, or really because of all the work done by those long fired?
And hate/spam is known to be going up. So they are at least not covering that.
He had money to run that company for years at a 4M burn rate but chose not to. He chose to fire people like a petulant child. And illegally in European countries.
Hopefully everyone sees it for what it is, he is an embarrassment of a CEO.