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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

He's only handing off the fiduciary duty. Basically he'll do what he wants with the platform and make someone else figure out how to make money with what he does.

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I think he's primarily hiring her for advertiser relations. She knows all the advertisers and can placate them.

Meanwhile hell drive the company and she can be the face

Advertising and product are not separate concerns. Advertising _is_ the business. If he doesn't take orders from her, the business will just get worse. His vision of "free speech" is in direct antagonism to the kind of brand-safe content that advertisers want.

What are the chances that he actually will listen to her and take her advice? I kind of think he's not accustomed to doing that.

There is no chance. That's not what he hired her for. She's just handling the Ads section and being the face of the company. That's it.

He's not going to take orders from her. That's not her role. And him being a lightning rod of controversy is the only thing that hurt the company. They are grinding out features faster than ever, the got rid of a ton of staff but are moving faster than at any time in the past.

You, and others like you want to paint Twitter as some huge failure because you dislike Musk, and that's fine, but in reality the biggest advertisers have come back and with her at the helm even more will.

First of all, if you want to see some real crazy racist stuff go on LinkedIn or Facebook. People there are even worse than Twitter.

All advertising companies took a hit, and Twitter is actually almost profitable at this point, so if she improves things it WILL be profitable. As soon as he can start paying down that 12 billion loan things will get even better.

> in reality the biggest advertisers have come back ... and Twitter is actually almost profitable at this point

References?

This is the closest thing I could find and it doesn't really back up your assertion: https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitters-advertising-busi...

Apple and Disney is what I'm referring to

? and you complain about other people speculating.

How is your gut feel more relevant than the technical analysis quoted by reuters?

You literally said:

> Twitter is actually almost profitable at this point

Musk has said this and he's the one who actually knows.

> Musk has said this

Should that be taken at face value? The man has repeatedly lied through his teeth, exaggerated, and misled the public for reason ranging from making money selling stock, inflating a meme coin's valuation because the mascot is the same breed of dog that he owns, hyping tech fantasies, up to petty rivalry.

I know that every business leader lies and or stretches truth, but his reputation for outright deception on all levels, especially when it comes to his businesses, is fairly established.

>Should that be taken at face value?

About as much as the word of any billionaire. The issue is we’ll only ever have his word, since Twitter is private, and being honest about financials when poor is bad for business.

I’m willing to believe it’s closer to the truth than not, though. For one cutting out ~5,700 employees, or around ~75% of your work force, is a massive cost reduction. According to Payscale[0] the average salary at Twitter was ~$117,000/yr. A quick calculation shows that annually he shaves off $666.9M (which is hilarious). Alongside decommissioning unneeded offices and removing all the completely unnecessary and expensive time-wasters I can imagine he’s at least saved $1B or more annually.

[0] - https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Twitter/Salary

Ok let’s assume your numbers are in the ballpark and he’s saving $1b annually on salaries and ancillary expenses.

Problem is he’s also loaded Twitter with significant debt to take it private. Estimated interest payments alone total to over $1.2b annually - so… we are actually losing an additional $200m annually even after firing 75% of the staff.

He's said in a Twitter spaces that he's reduced the expenditures down to basically the interest payment and another billion and a half on top of that. A large part of the reduction was shutting down a lot of the unused servers.

So 2.5 billion in expenses. In 2021 Twitter had Revenue of 5 Billion. So obviously they have lost a lot of revenue, as Elon himself has admitted. But between the cuts they are close to breakeven.

Now with a new CEO who is much more advertiser friendly they are going to get a lot more advertisers back. She will be the new face of the company. Then, likely they will start paying down that debt. Each time they do their burden will be less.

Tesla is the most profitable car company per car. Musk isn't going to have a problem making Twitter profitable, though he put himself behind the 8 ball.

Way behind the eight ball. He managed to take an already toxic platform and make it worse (somehow). When I visit it, not logged in, all I see are promoted Musk tweets and stupid memes totally unrelated to the content I just viewed. Makes it entirely unpalatable for me.

As they say, at least it’s not rocket science. Except in this case apparently running a social media site is actually more difficult than rocket science.

In true leveraged buyout fashion however, those cost savings are going straight back to the banks that provided Musk with financing. Twitter has paid $600m in two interest payments this calendar year.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-03/twitter-s...

That payscale number is way low for one thing

> And him being a lightning rod of controversy is the only thing that hurt the company.

Even if I take as granted the advertiser problem is solved, it seems like Twitter has still been hurt by much more than having a controversial CEO:

1. Musk took on significant debt in order to buy a company already slightly losing money. Because of this, it's not good enough for advertisers to just "come back", they need to greatly increase their ad spend on twitter.

2. Twitter's attempt to find an alternative revenue source (the significant changes to Twitter Blue) seem to have largely failed.

3. The disaster with verification is driving away some of Twitter's most important posters that generated content on the website for free.

4. Twitter's reputation as an employer has plummetted and they are presumably not attracting anywhere near the amount of talent they previously did.

1. This would be true if he didn't massively axe the staff. So they are almost profitable now as he said. He has a lot of debt but even with the debt he's nearly break even.

2.First of all you don't really know the numbers, it's a guess at best.

3. They are getting bohemoth players who are going to be running shows on Twitter now. This is a huge deal and wasn't even possible on old Twitter.

4. People are desperate for jobs in tech right now. Besides they haven't been struggling to hire, they've been mostly laying off people.

As they run a profit they will pay that debt down (or refinance if rates go lower).

They are launching a lot of new stuff and the future looks way brighter

>> 3. The disaster with verification is driving away some of Twitter's most important posters that generated content on the website for free.

Who are these posters you are referring to?

News organizations.

but in reality the biggest advertisers have come back and with her at the helm even more will.

I would bet advertisers like Apple got a huge sweetheart deal. The majority of advertising I see is (by volume), crappy "As Seen On TV" type products fronted by MANY different accounts (I can't block them fast enough), accounts promoting whatever thought leader angle they are working (also insta-blocked), and finally large brands that Twitter probably would like a lot more of.

If they add 1000 new features but continue to roll back content moderation the platform will be unequivocally worse. Doubly so if the new features are as poorly thought out as the blue checkmarks. That guy Halli that he got into a public spat with is probably the most brilliant designer I've ever worked with and Musk treated him like shit while whining about API calls. He also treated the head of Trust and Safety like shit.

This is a great listen to see both the intellectual might and capricious irrationality of Musk's leadership:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/797/what-i-was-thinking-as-...

Cry more.

Twitter is a failure because of Musk. It’s ‘you’ who want to make it into something other than that.

The ‘new features’ are basically irrelevant and much of it has been chaos or failure. The fact is there’s not much in terms of basic feature churn that’s going to make Twitter much better.

Brand Trust is incredibly hard to build easy to lose and incredibly hard to rebuild.

Musk is a stain on Twitter there is no avoiding it. He could have accomplished faster feature dev without losing half of revenue and also could have done a better job rolling out verified and blue. In fact most CEOs probably could have done that.

It’s a pretty big fail he needs to replace himself and go do something else.

I thought I liked Musk. Fwiw. Space, mars, pushing the automotive industry towarss electrical vehicles faster than they would otherwise. I mean that stuff was awesome. I don't care whether he had or had not some initial seed money from his personal inheritance, that's just bullshit, plenty of rich people just sit on their asses. That guy was doing cool stuff; useful stuff.

Then I saw what he did to twitter, the way he stirred everybody up creating chaos for reasons that were quite explicitly personal motivations.

I used to follow a few people and topics I care about. I now get a lot of unrelated stuff I don't care about. The system is tuned so I have to see the outrage even if I don't care about it.

This is either intentional or non intentional (a bug). In either case it's a mistake that Mr. Musk bears direct responsibility for.

Why? What happened? Was it COVID that drove him mad? That he had to close the factories and offices and whatnot? Was he already like that but I wasn't aware because I don't care about celebrities unless they literally appear in my timeline even if I unsubscribe and mute them?

I think it's you and your overreacting mostly

Maybe you are purposely ignoring many data points of how badly things are going. Musk instituted blue checkmarks that are purchased by a subset of customers with particular views. If you question this, look at the responses to Biden tweets and see the positions of anti- vs pro-Biden comments.

Because of this, Twitter is ridiculously partisan on my feed. I’ve limited my consumption of it to very small subject matters and will likely jump ship totally to BlueSky with some Mastodon thrown in. I know a lot of people in science who have completely abandoned Twitter.

Yes and even if the motivation of all the people leaving Twitter were futile, it still happened. I no longer see the content I once saw and that is an objective measurable effect which not only happened during Musk's watch but arguably happened in direct reaction to what he said and did.

Which is exactly how Facebook works/worked - Sheryl was the person driving the business towards profitability and Mark wanted to "connect the world".

Except Mark is far, far less erratic.

> META

sure, was.

We don't know what "advertisers want", because there is no objective advertiser milieu. It has been ruined by pressure campaigns from political groups that are propped up by an extremist media. The only significant drama originates from these pressure campaigns, from groups who are upset that Twitter no longer acts as their de facto partisan agent.

The way to seek even ground is for corporations to stop responding to media pressure, and for the press to abandon that role once society rejects it for them. Until then, the pendulum is going to swing too heavily in both directions.

That actually worked with SpaceX though. Elon handed off operations and "making money" to Gwynne Shotwell and she killed it.

Elon is still working on moonshots like Starship, but it let the core F9 product run operationally smoothly and rake in cash.

Is SpaceX profitable ?

Last estimates I saw suggested they are still bleeding a lot of money every month.

It's private, so we have no way of knowing.

Who knows, but the question is more of unit economics than company profitability. Falcon could be profitable on a per-launch basis, and all the profit gets shuttled back into R&D.

Not the company overall, but the Falcon 9 + Falcon Heavy platforms themselves are vastly profitable.

"Our widgets are profitable, but all of the R&D, sales people, back-office people, etc. etc. required to actually run a business makes us unprofitable"

So ummm who's gonna pay all of those people to make sure the robots and people make the widgets every day?

The other expense is the novel Starship R&D program. It's not "back-office people". You're either very uninformed or just sniping in bad faith.

> either very uninformed

And you provided no source and narrowly scoped profitability to singular projects. This is so myopic when it comes to how a business is run.

OK, if you want sources, just look at the numbers here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio....

SpaceX has the vast majority of the worldwide private launch market. It's the only company with a reusable first-stage booster. The cost-per-KG is 10-20% of the competition.

This isn't me speculating wildly, everyone with even passing familiarity with the industry knows this.

> This isn't me speculating wildly, everyone with even passing familiarity with the industry knows this.

I never questioned their market dominance, I questioned their overall company profitability. The cost of building a rocket can be easily fudged to create whatever financial picture you want. Not to mention Elon Musk is notorious for doing this. Unless you have access to their financial statements, all of this conjecture.

> The cost-per-KG is 10-20% of the competition.

Uhh might wanna check your source, from Wikipedia: "These varying cost and requirements makes market analysis imprecise."...

if they are ever in financial distress, the US would never let this company get sold to questionable third party or any foreign power.

probably some contract that will give them stability will appear from somewhere, at least until the ISS is decommissioned.

SpaceX really seems to be "betting the farm" on Starlink being a massive moneymaker. I don't see it longterm though.

Elon Musk said in his Twitter Space interview right after Starship test launch that SpaceX doesn't need to raise money for a while, other than letting employees cashing out some shares twice a year.

Not that I disagree, but what Elon Musk says about financials of his companies, is 100% driven but the picture of it he wants to paint, and can have 0% relation to the reality.

I’m confused why this is even in doubt? It’s a twenty year old company with over ten thousand employees. How could it not be profitable?

But he never owned product or tech decisions at SpaceX. He was only ever the money guy.

Not according to SpaceX engineers. Musk is hands-on. Always has been (for good and bad).

Do you think SpaceX just accidentally became the first company to reuse a booster?

Sorry to be obtuse here, but does "killed it" mean that she brought in great revenues or did it mean that she sent it headed to oblivion? Slang can be kind of dangerous sometimes.

Means she's doing a great job.

I do not believe Twitter is doing a great job or that they're somehow more profitable now.

He owns the company, so I'm not sure what you mean by fiduciary duty. Duty to who?

I believe he borrowed a big chunk of the cash. So he owes these folks something for funding it. It might be kind of limited but he can't just treat it like his own fiefdom.

He owns the majority of the company, but not all of it. There are other partial owners as well (Qatar, A Saudia Prince, Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey, a venture capitalist or two, etc).

To the entity and to the shareholders. Sometimes to the creditors.

I can't see how that could be correct. Firstly, if he runs product then there needs to be deep strategic alignment and he can't leave it to the CEO to "figure out how to make money", secondly, it's not just fiduciary duties for the CEO (or at least that is a gross simplification) - my bet is Elon is thrilled to hand over some of the organisational structure, marketing, sales, people and finance operational and strategic aspects that aren't directly related to the unique vision of Twitter and the product and engineering processes itself. And as the owner and chair he'll still be very much involved with things at a high level too.

Says he’s still an officer, so I don’t think this is true.

Doesn't matter now either way, he's destroyed twitter for me and I'm not coming back.

Likewise, especially because (1) he still owns it and (2) he can revert this at the drop of a hat and (3) he will likely be one heck of a backseat driver while she takes all the heat for his fuckups.

What change "destroyed" it for you? Was it extending the tweet length limit? Opening up verification for individuals? Organization labels? Bringing back a "following" timeline?

From my POV, it's gotten objectively better at a rapid clip over the past 6 months and I've been seeing less off-topic stuff in my feed (which is basically anything not programming-related) or a few other accounts I follow.

Also: long form videos, subscriptions, encrypted messaging.

Upcoming possibilities: video conferencing, micropayments á la WeChat.

I think the acquisition has opened up a lot of interesting possibilities and potential for a service that had become stale.

Courting actual Nazis, white supremacists, MAGA extremists and pushing them into prominence on feeds. And his constant need to feed his ego.

Can you provide examples of this? And I mean genuine extremists rather than just people you disagree with.

He brought back anyone previously banned for open naziism such as Andrew Anglin and more recently Patriotic Alternative. And some suspicious several “14 88” referencing tweets. There’s also the Nazi meme he posted. Then the Nazi with several huge Nazi tattoos that he defended as unlikely to be a Nazi. Or the groyper memeing. Then the Angelicism / Milady Maker memeing, an nft project made by crypto neonazis with anime swastika homepages

I checked just now and Andrew Anglin's account is suspended. I wasnt able to find a Patriotic Alternative account and when I searched on it, the overwhelming majority of the tweets were critical. And the content of the so-called nazi meme appears to have nothing to do with Nazism other than the shape of a helmet. It's actually about the speed of technology change. And from what I can tell Nick Fuentes/Groyper thing was on twitter for 24hrs before being suspended. So I dunno....it looks like you are providing a distorted view to support a narrative. If I wanted to I'm sure I could find all kinds of other hate content on the fringes that is equally nasty but sits outside the "narrative" we are constantly being force-fed.

you haven't looked much. those are also people who were let back and again suspended after obvious and newsworthy pressure from advertisers. lmk if you want more detail... or if you're unserious about this

I didn’t say he’s very effective so far at whatever he’s doing. He caves to pressure and material realities like anyone and covers ass

Sure if you have some links although Im assuming itll be some leftwing news outlets doing what you appear to be doing, which is dressing up supposition and hearsay as fact.

Generally for me I mostly ignore the media as I find its largely distortions and half-truths. Not to mention Twitter is increasingly their competitor so unlikely to be objective anyway.

I just go on what I see with my own eyes and it seems pretty clean to me.

All those were ones I saw first hand

ok my experience is very different. Here's a short video on this exact topic of an interview with Elon Musk and a BBC "journalist" (I use that label very loosely).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqJKAnN0-gM

Idk what you’re showing me, a bad interviewer Elon accepted and edited by Daily Caller. Goodbye

Just mentioning as your comments reminded me of the BBC guy.

I'm skeptical given how often I've seen people be accused of being nazis and upon investigating discovering to my disappointment some rather milktoast views that would have been mainstream in 1990.

Can you name an actual nazi he is courting?

From a product perspective it’s certainly better.

But his antics drove away a significant chunk of the user base I care about.

It always makes me laugh how, for years, we mocked journalists because of their inflated blue check egos, and now every "free thinker" out there is eager to pay to be just like them. Verification is meaningless for most individuals since there's no real need to verify if @ronny2938742 is indeed Mr. Ron Whatever.

However, it's crucial to know if an account claiming to be a big company, government agency, journalist, politician, etc. is legitimate. Opening verification to subscribers is absolutely scammy, just a way to make a couple of bucks off the victims of culture war brainwashing.

Funny. I see it differently. I pay for the blue check because it adds legitimacy. If I'm replying and having conversations with people with similar blue checks then I know I'm talking to real humans not hiding behind fake usernames. Also, any threats or anything from bad actors could otherwise be tracked based on payment method.

When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames? What do you think underlies this feeling you seem to have?

EDIT: what I do think was a tremendous success is the publicity stunt. I've never seen any platform where people felt they should pay to let people know they were who they claimed to be. Kudos to the people doing the whole "twitter is filled with bots" psyop, it worked.

> When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames?

On HN, I'm not bothered at all. If I see the username "dang" for example, I know it's YC moderator dang also same with "patio11". I see HN as more of a private group discourse vs Twitter where it's public and where blue makes more sense. Akin to a forum, where I frequent like home-barista, the community is smaller and more focused so I don't see why having blue makes sense.

At least in my circles blue check marks were mocked because they became a symbol of endorsement of certain viewpoints by Twitter rather than a symbol of verified identity.

And yet the process to grant bluecheck was to literally check personal id, and grant it to whoever had media presence. For years, you could request verification, send a couple of links citing you, provide a government-issued ID and that was it.

Twitter verified literally every public figure it could - regardless of politics - even those who didn't seem to need verification. However, being a niche contrarian blogger does not make you a public figure, and that's where I feel the resentment is located.

The accounts of companies, government agencies and people linked to those two have a different color of check or a special icon. This seems like an actual improvement on everyone being blue to me.

I acknowledge they're shipping changes to the frontend - some of which are not bad at all - but it sounds surreal to me that we keep talking about UI changes as if they were major features, and pretend twitter circles aren't broken, that notifications are as in near real time as they were, etc. There were major losses of service quality in basically everything backend related, and no amount of frontend tweaking can compensate that.

Effectively taking away API access by charging a huge fee for it is what made me move on personally.

See Sam Harris’s interview about the issues with Musk that are directly done on Twitter by Musk himself.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRKaMHCD/

Sam Harris is a radical leftist.

He’s a liberal

>I've never been under any illusion that he is Orange Hitler.

>I supported censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story because it helped Biden

>I’ve said on several occasions that I think Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden

>Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared. There’s nothing, it’s Hunter Biden, it’s not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It’s like a firefly to the sun.

That's sounds like a radical leftist to me with a severe case of TDS.

Electoralism is liberalism

I hadn't realized how lost Sam had gotten until I saw his Triggernometry interview [0]. I had a lot of respect for him once but he's clearly lost the plot.

[0] https://youtu.be/DDqtFS_Pvcs

My feed is no longer related to my interests and I don’t know how to get it back on track. That and losing the confidence that the blue check posting is actually someone relevant. Really kills the enjoyment for me.

Over the last few days my feed have been full of actual, literal fascists and other people I have no interest in seeing anything from.

I spend less and less time on Twitter, and it's less and less enjoyable. Unless it changes drastically I won't still be there very long.

You can fix that by not clicking on things you don't like, because it shows you more of what you click. You can end up with a feed with fascists or communists or both because free speech applies to all. But again, you can choose what you want to see by training the algo or by using the feed of who you are following.

The problem with those assertions is that it didn't use to show me any of this content. It used to show me content I was reasonably happy with. Then the content showing up for me very rapidly changed towards including a huge amount of extreme right-wing content and bigotry over a period that I was hardly active, and only used the "Followers" tab and clicked on content I enjoyed from people who don't in any way fit the profile of the type of accounts I complained about earlier.

At best the quality of their recommendation system has dramatically declined. At worst they're intentionally favouring different stuff. In between there are slightly more palatable (than the worst case) options, such as that they're favouring overall popularity of content more over your individual preferences, but in any case all I know is that it's turned from a relatively pleasant experience to pushing content in my face that disgusts me.

I've also written recommendation systems. In fact, I've written one I used to run on top of Twitters API. And so I know from first-hand experience that it's trivial to get better quality recommendations more aligned with what I click on than what I'm currently getting. Something is seriously wrong, whether accidentally or intentionally.

The complete destruction of content moderation and his personal beefs with users. He has been preaching "free speech" but he is enabling the worst people in the world while laying dishonest criticism on anyone he doesn't personally like.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cat-dog-torture-video...

I get pushed openly Nazi content. Like Nazi symbology (the obvious ones, not the deep cut pseudo ambiguous ones) memes and art and quote accounts. I used to report but they get turned down or only suspended for some days.

I also now get pushed a lot of fight and public freak out videos specifically of black people with pages of replies talking about eugenics

The app pushes me back to “for you” repeatedly where this stuff mostly is, or I get a push notification, or it shows up in following feed sometimes for people I don’t follow

For me, it was killing the API access. The native client sucks.

Three of those four changes (tweet length, paid checks, timeline changes) have made Twitter substantially worse to use. Now every reasonably popular tweet's replies are drowning in irrelevant novel-length screeds and emoji-laden nonsense from paying users.

Not going back either, but mostly because it gave me the impetus to get off and discover what a useless timesink it was for me from the start. So Elon does get my thanks for that. I don't miss it just like I don't miss FB since dropping off that ~10 yrs ago.

I agree with you though I do miss PaulG. I was excited when he was on Mastodon because I could follow him with RSS.

"fiduciary duty" == censorship over whatever narrative twitter is being used to push...

Ill never forget my interview at twitter in ~2007

>"What do you think that twitter is?"

>>"Well, most people think of twitter as a social media platform, but I think its a global sentiment engine and litmus"

Yes that was my actual answer.

Did you get the job?

If I was asked that now, I’d say:

“Twitter is my drunk aunt and uncle who absolutely hate each other at this point at a family gathering.”

Ah, memories.

Sums up the political discourse pretty well though.

And now we have CCP fighting CIA/NSA and its weird how publicly we can see it? Are they failing forward???

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