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Comment by whitemary | Hacker News Reader

> ...and now it’s time to right size to better fit a changing market.

Come again? What is this supposed to mean?

It means:

Some idiot (Musk) decided to axe 90% of workers, and the company hasn't completely evaporated (Twitter). Investors; therefore, are jumping on the signal that a bunch of capital is allocated to non-productive work.

Therefore, Welch it, trim the fat, give me back my money so I can stop being a source of welfare for techies, and start pouring money into something interesting.

I don't know if this is why you were downvoted, but please avoid using the term Welch. It's an ethnic slur against Welsh people.

Jack Welch was CEO of GE, best known for dramatic divestments, layoffs, and stack ranking.

That's a retcon. Use of Welch in a derogatory way predates him by hundreds of years.

Ya and no one here has ever heard of it but you. How would that even make sense in that context?

Was referring to the CEO mate, but henceforth noted.

The must hate Welch Grape juice

> It's an ethnic slur against Welsh people

> Etymologists can find no firm evidence that the verb welsh, meaning "to swindle a person by not paying a debt" or "to fail to fulfill an obligation," is derived from Welsh, the people of Wales."

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/welsh#cite_note-AHG-1

The term is recognised as a slur in the UK https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33238925

Besides, Occam's razor applies. The term was coined in England, which is adjacent to Wales and historically has a degree of anti Wales sentiment.

Where are any alternative etymologies? There are none.

It’s a name in this context. Why would they not use someone’s name? To avoid using an obscure slur that no one’s heard of?

Lol. It’s a name.

Twitter has almost evaporated. What would someone buy it for today? A billion dollars? Maybe two? He couldn't have more effectively destroyed its value I don't think.

By what metric? I’ve been using it every day since Musk took over and the only time I notice things is when people point them out (and people love to point them out).

By contrast I couldn’t Netflix to stop buffering last night and the last I heard they haven’t had really any layoffs.

Well, Elon Musk just sent Twitter employees an email saying it's worth about $20B. He paid $44B for it.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1640049750966665218

What was it worth when he took ownership?

It's complicated. He offered way too much. He made an incredibly poor deal with them. The market went down after he made his offer. So he put himself into a bad position. Anything is worth what people will pay for it.

I thought maybe 10b was what it was worth. And he could have gotten out of it by paying a $1 billion cancel fee, something like that. It appeared his ego prevented him from considering that. But it all goes back to him signing a terrible agreement in the first place.

> And he could have gotten out of it by paying a $1 billion cancel fee, something like that

I'm not sure why people are still repeating that. No, he couldn't, that fee would have been due if external influence would have prevented him from completing the transaction (e.g. the government banning the sale somehow).

Hmm, I guess I could be wrong, I read that in a story about the purchase.

So the value was in the employees who were fired?

Their advertising revenue has plummeted since Musk took over. $20b is the Musk spin number, so the reality is even worse

My WAG is their revenue has fallen to under 2 billion a year, maybe less than $1B. Since they stopped paying the bills for things, their costs have gone way down ;-)

If elon saying it’s worth 20B then 2B sounds about right

"By contrast I couldn’t Netflix to stop buffering last night and the last I heard they haven’t had really any layoffs."

I'm pretty sure that's you and not Netflix.

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