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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions, but doesn't get into, Elon Musk. Apparently Spez is a huge Musk wannabe, and is basing his latest set of actions off of that. Viewed through that lense, it all almost makes sense. Why you'd want to be a raging butthole is another story, but that is the path Spez has chosen. It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it works out for him.

Spez doesn't realize he's not an eccentric billionaire with a track record of success, and even if he was, Reddit isn't Twitter, and Elon isn't actually doing a good job with Twitter anyway. Maybe Discord forums will become indexable, or maybe lemmy will get to be hosting friendly, or maybe a web3 something will take Reddits place. All I know is both Slashdot.org and Digg.com still resolve, but I haven't been to either in years. They're still up, paying its owners ad revenue from readers. Which, under capitalism is all you can ask for, really.

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I don't understand the impulse to aspire to be like an insufferable asshat (musk). Is this some kind of power thing to be a famous/infamous figure of industry that gets to be an absolute piece shit with impunity?

Before Elon people were copycatting Steve Jobs. I think every decade has the Insufferable Successful Asshat that pervades the Id of business owners and managers.

Mortals who are concerned about impermanence deflect their worries and focus on accumulation of wealth and power, controlling others and making supposed success occur in their lives.

that's my opinion

>and Elon isn't actually doing a good job with Twitter anyway

Are there any user engagement numbers to back this statement up? I constantly see and hear this, but a lot of the people I followed that initially left Twitter for Mastodon after Musk took over have recently returned.

EDITED: not financial, but user engagement.

Fidelity has downgraded their Twitter debt at lest twice now.

From $8.63b in November to $7.8b in January, to $6.55b in April.

I don’t think all of his choices are bad (headcount reduction as an example, but I think he went overboard with it), but there are numbers that back it up somewhat.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/fidelity-marks-down-value...

In addition to what Flutas already posted https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sal...

> But Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 percent from a year earlier, according to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times. The company has regularly fallen short of its U.S. weekly sales projections, sometimes by as much as 30 percent, the document said.

> That performance is unlikely to improve anytime soon, according to the documents and seven current and former Twitter employees.

If that isn't abject failure, what is?

Waterloo baby, it's their Waterloo. Woa Woa Woa.

If that isn't abject failure, what is?

Musk apparently laid of massive numbers of engineers, each news story seemed to grow the tale.

If he laid off 50% of engineers, and the highest paid ones at that, I'd say profits would be up, or at least the same, even with that drop in revenue.

I wonder what the true story is, re: profit, and without any tax savings writedowns / earning reports in rhe mix.

> I'd say profits would be up, or at least the same

Unfortunately, even if that is the case, there's $1B of debt servicing per year which wipes that completely out.

Even in what I think was Twitter's best year, they only made $580M profit (which ended up being a $220M loss because of an $800M settlement) - and that included a much better ad revenue situation, etc.

I should have clarified I'm looking for user engagement numbers, not stock price. There are dozens of Tech stocks that have had prices slashed: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/07/here-are-10-of-the-worst-per...

>If that isn't abject failure, what is?

Users fleeing the platform and no longer providing revenue would be abject failure. Companies pausing advertisement dollars as rates rise and tech generally having a tumultuous time in the market isn't an "abject failure".

advertising revenue isn't stock price

and advertising revenue isn't profit

> Apparently Spez is a huge [Elon] Musk wannabe, and is basing his latest set of actions off of that

Oh yes, NBC had an interview with spez and he said exactly that. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-prote...

This is a good analysis, I think.

I was going to say that “my opinion is that he’s doing a bad acting job of an extraterrestrial attempting to play the role of sociopath CEO”, but you capture it much better than I did.

Put another way, everyone reaches their level of mediocrity at some point. He seems to be coasting above his. I wonder what his crash landing will look like.

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