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Comment by robot_no_421 | Hacker News Reader

Anybody feel like this is ironically going to accelerate the decline of twitter?

I'm never, EVER making a twitter account. However publishers still communicate with me via tweets I could see. Now that I need an account to view tweets, publishers just have a smaller audience.

I'll just see the screenshots on reddit anyway :)

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All sorts of services seem to think that mandatory accounts drive "engagement". No doubt it works on certain metrics. Long term... we'll see. I know I still don't have a Pinterest account.

He needs revenue right now, and the other monetization efforts haven't panned out (blue checks, advertising, etc.). So he's trying to make a quick buck from user-generated data now that the LLM rush is at an all time high. For that he needs to limit access to the data in the first place, otherwise nobody would be paying for publicly available data.

This is how death spirals work. Twitter was treading water a year ago. Taking on lots of debt caused mass layoffs, worrying people about site stability and making them investigate other platforms. A lot of bad tweets scared away advertisers, causing more layoffs and desperation. Signed-in users engage more, so make all users signed-in users (no logical fallacies here).

I’m learning more about the Twitter situation slowly. Why did it take on massive debt?

Because Elon was forced to overpay for Twitter and getting that much money is difficult.

Saying he was "forced to overpay" isn't a fair characterization. As a joke that went too far, he voluntarily offered to overpay at what in hindsight was the peak, then signed a contract making it official. He was only forced to uphold the contract.

Fair elaboration.

Musk did that to finance his purchase.

Leveraged buyout. Twitter is now forced to carry the debt that incurred from its own acquisition

That doesn't make sense. Why is Twitter forced to hold the debt for being purchased and not Elon?

Looking at the numbers that is a lot of debt:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-see...

"As part of the deal, Twitter will add about $13 billion of debt. Analysts estimate, based on terms previously laid out in documents related to the transaction, that Twitter would be on the hook for annual interest payments of more than $1 billion, compared with some $51 million in 2021."

> Why is Twitter forced to hold the debt for being purchased and not Elon?

Just because that's what was written into the contract when the acquisition happened. Something different could have been put in the contract, but this is what was actually written in it and signed off on by all the parties to the deal.

That is no different than buying a house with a loan, where the loan is backed by the same house.

Incidentally, has there ever been a leveraged buyout that wasn’t a disaster? Presumably there must be some which are a success at least for the buyer, or people wouldn’t keep doing it, but it really doesn’t seem to have a great track record for anyone involved, as a strategy.

Yes, private equity has been incredibly successful in the last decade. Usually not overpaying to buy a $44 billion dollar company though.

> (twitter) needs revenue right now, and the other monetization efforts haven't panned out

Twitter monetizes via 1. advertising, 2. subscriptions, 3. API sales, admittedly I have no idea of the actual numbers.

The first claim (that Twitter needs revenue urgently) seems false since the owner has deep pockets.

How many companies owned by the world’s richest men have had lay offs in the last 18 months?

They became that rich by not losing money. It’s a sinking ship and he is trying to plug the hole.

Correlation does not equal causation. Although unprofitable companies might be inclined layoff employees, it's not implied that layoffs are a sign of unprofitability (in fact, the opposite could be true: laying off employees whose marginal value is low could cause a company to be more profitable).

Twitter is still $20B away from being in the green from even the most generous estimates. (Elon himself)

Currently Twitter is in the red, and he needs it to not be that and to generate a multi-billion surplus to pay back the investors he took up to finance this.

> Twitter is still $20B away from being (profitable)

Can you explain how Twitter manages to spend $20B per year?

Say they have 1000 employees @ $200k/year, that's $200m/year (1/5th of 1B). Where are the remaining $19.8B being spent? That figure doesn't pass the sniff test.

That’s because you’ve misunderstood. Twitter is worth $20B. We don’t know what they spend nor how much they make as a profit because they’re a private company.

What I’m saying is for Elon to even break even on the deal, using the information we have access to, he needs its evaluations to reach at least $40B. Once it reaches that, it actually proves itself as having been at minimum a neutral purchase. Albeit the real numbers it has to reach and how much profit it needs are both currently unknown.

Twitter is full of low-quality garbage, partly due to the culture and partly due to the format. I am very doubtful that it has much value for LLM pretraining OR fine-tuning.

That’s a good point. I think (in jest) the data is invaluable for training automated trolls, for which various state actors should be willing to pay good money.

But more seriously, maybe the value is in it being a real-time source of new data, albeit the signal is drowned in noise like a needle in a hay stack.

> Anybody feel like this is ironically going to accelerate the decline of twitter?

If Musks claim today is true ("This platform hit another all-time high in user-seconds last week"), then it is very much not in decline...

anything that elon musk says is true by coincidence only

That's a fancy way to say it's infested by scraping bots, which makes sense since its been weeks since the API was dropped

Well it likely isn't true [1]. Musk seems to come across more and more as a perpetual liar.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-seeing-record-user-eng...

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