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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

Also consistent with his stated goal of making the business profitable.

> Also consistent with his stated goal of making the business profitable.

It was profitable. He caused it to hurtle toward bankruptcy.

Did he? My understanding was that it was not profitable and that he's been cutting costs and exploring new sources of income (Twitter Blue, API fee, etc.). I don't know if he'll be successful but his actions seem consistent with him caring about Twitter as a business. In fact, he seems to have sacrificed his public image considerably towards that goal (not consistent with him mostly caring about his "megaphone").

Your understanding is wrong, I’m afraid. Twitter was profitable before the acquisition. (If you look this up don’t be misled by the once-off loss caused by losing a legal case).

Do you have a source on that? I've read several articles claiming that Twitter was only ever profitable in 2018-2019. e.g.

https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2022/12/21/twitter-and-its-f...:

> Twitter has been operating at a massive loss for years, failing to book an annual profit since 2019 (Mauer, 2022). For eight out of the last ten years, the company has posted a loss.

It was profitable those 2 years, then they lost a big lawsuit which caused a pretty big loss in 2020. But overall since its IPO 2013 and 2020 were the only years where its cashflow actually got worse - overall it was trending towards a more sustainable cashflow. By silicon valley/US corporation standards that's far from a dumpster fire or anything.

https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...

TWTR has underperformed nasdaq by a factor of 2 since going public. It's been a woefully inefficient organization and there's no amount of political bias that can paper over that.

Which has very little to do with profit.

It made a profit 2 years before he bought it. And the only reason it made a loss the last complete fiscal year before he bought it was due to a massive > $1Bn FCC (or FTC?) fine.

Twitter’s underlying business was already profitable.

> He caused

He almost certainly caused some advertisers to leave, but as a reference snapchat had similar decreases in advertising spend, so its hard to argue this is all Musk and not considerably due to economic conditions and apple's privacy changes

That remains to be seen...

I would not be surprised if he could have offered the api $420/mo and 100x more apps were willing and/or able to pay.

I’m not sure saddling twitter with more debt does that.

How does cutting out a free API tier saddle Twitter with more debt?

The purchase did.

Yes he probably doesn't care about making Twitter profitable in the abstract, but as a self-interested businessman who now owns it.

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