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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

> Hopefully, Elon notices that we don't have endless HN and reddit front page articles about Rupert Murdoch's jet.

Are you kidding? He loves the attention, and we are only talking about Twitter because Elon bought it rather than some boring guy.

I still don't see the impending death of Twitter. Where is the evidence that it is going down the tubes? PG will be back, because everything bad about Twitter is even worse on Mastodon -- instead of one narcissistic Napoleon running things like Twitter, Mastodon has hundreds of them, and they are even less accountable than Elon.

If you want to kill Twitter, stopping giving it free publicity would be a good start. But you can't help yourselves, so it survives and thrives on your outrage.

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You aren't wrong in some senses, but I think you're wrong in the most important sense: Twitter's servers run on electricity, and electricity is paid for with ads and MAUs, not outrage on HN (and other tech forums).

Servers are not that expensive, especially not when people are going to Twitter because they are outraged and seeing all the ads, and others are paying $8 per month.

Whether or not that works out is not something I can predict, but having more user engagement than ever before is not a bad thing for a platform that makes literally every penny from exploiting user engagement in some way.

Expensive enough to try and shirk the bills, it seems[1].

I would say that 95% of my professional circle was on Twitter 3 months ago. Today, it feels like less than 50%. Of that same circle, I only know one who paid $8 for Twitter Blue, and he canceled this month.

Outrage-driven engagement is definitely happening. But it needs to happen on Twitter, and in a way that doesn't threaten Twitter's ad sales, for it to be of any value to Twitter.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/technology/elon-musk-twit...

That article seems to suggest that Musk has considered cutting just about everything except servers (including paying the lease on the buildings).

But nowhere does it mention cutting servers.

> Mr. Davis, the president of the Boring Company, has also directed Twitter employees to renegotiate the deals that the company has with firms such as Amazon and Oracle, which provide computing and tech services, the people said. The employees were told to suggest to those companies that Mr. Musk’s firms would not work with them in the future if they refused to renegotiate, the people said.

Twitter has their own datacenters, so this is likely to be peripheral. But we do know they've fired the majority of the staff actually operating those datacenters.

Musk reminds me of Citizen Kane. He could lose $5 billion per year for 20 years and still be significantly wealthier than most people on the planet.

The comparison is apt[1]!

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

Bankruptcy seems inevitable at this point.

*Speculation on my part* I think that's why Elon did the poll about stepping down. He probably went to Qatar for the World Cup final not just as a spectator but also looking to sell more shares. His poll was a result of the Saudis not being interested. He'll back away and let Twitter go into bankruptcy under someone else.

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