Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoesntMatter22 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

> 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

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.

> 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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com