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Comment by gemstones | Hacker News Reader

When Elon told the whole world that making Twitter is easy and requires a lot less people than they had, it was inevitable that competitors would take that to mean that they should develop their own versions.

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The irony of the entire situation is that you can start a new Twitter with 10 people, but you can't maintain the existing Twitter with 10 people. I don't know what his mental model of management is, but it seems severely lacking, as in maybe he has people at Tesla and SpaceX that "round him out" and fill-in gaps in his thinking. At Twitter, every move he makes is contrary to his own interests.

> At Twitter, every move he makes is contrary to his own interests.

While he may drive a Tesla and use Starlink, he didn't create SpaceX or swoop in and take control of Tesla as an obsessive customer with an agenda as a customer.

I don’t think that that entirely explains why Musk Twitter isn’t like Tesla or SpaceX, but I can’t imagine its not a significant factor.

(I also think that, distinct from his customer-agenda, him seeing it as an opportunity to relitigate his finance app history getting booted as CEO of X.com twice before it became PayPal is an issue that impacts more than the names he has used for the companies used in the Twitter acquisition.)

I believe the largest factor is that he never intended to buy it, tried to get out of buying it, when he had to buy it he didn't get enough investors and saddled Twitter with high debt, which made him turn to sharp "cost-cutting measures" which as a result lost him even more money and put him on a stressful downward spiral in which he's losing billion a year, and he can't stop it, and is constantly making bad decisions like an animal that the more it moves, the deeper it gets stuck into the shark's mouth.

It’s really the first bit that slightly stretches credulity. Like, presumably at some point some lawyer told him “this isn’t like a consumer contract, once you’ve signed you’ve signed”.

Maybe a lawyer told him. But was he listening?

He's definitely not the type that listens to his advisors, no. Which is not always a bad thing, and I think it got him where he is, but it feels like at some point he got overwhelmed by his own success and started thinking every one of his whims was gold.

Of course competitors already knew that.

But this is not the difficult bit in building a competitor. The difficult bit is to make people switch en masse.

100%

He opened up the arena.

Elon, of course, was helpfully assisted with the difficult bit, too. If Facebook had launched a twitter-y thing two years ago, I think the general view would have been “oh, cool, it’ll probably be just as popular as Facebook Dating”.

#thank Elon for bringing the opportunity on a silver plate.

Zuck and the threads team are probably thinking about that

In a sense that was correct as "Project 92" was started in Jan 2023 and they had the Meta infrastructure (photo storage/message storage/cloud ???) and Instagram account/content moderation to piggyback from.

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