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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I think Elon bought Twitter to purposefully destroy it. He's doing almost everything wrong, if that's not his goal.

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Perhaps, but it’s easy to attribute malice to what is done by sheer incompetence. To me the situation reads like he bought his favorite toy and is playing with it until it breaks.

I'm baffled that anyone is looking for any other explanation, honestly. He has no idea what he's doing; it's unclear to me why a weird conspiracy-based explanation is required.

Folk are very resistant to the idea the world's richest man might actually be a charlatan. It offends their faith in a just world.

Why are you baffled people are sceptical of elite trickery when it has been going on for thousands of years?

Musk seems unstable, but Tesla, his stocks and various other endevaours has been masterfully constructed to extract public wealth and placing it into private hands.

This is probably just him being bipolar or whatever, but every day companies are being purposefully run to the ground, resold, repackaged, sabotaged etc. for a myriad of financial reasons.

The whole "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity " is such a disgusting american smokescreen, same with the stupid "occamz razor" being constantly used wrongly to shut down old school financial journalism or conspiratorial nature of the upper echelons of society, something that was in the public consciousness 50 years ago, but has now been memoryholed. It's so laughably convenient if it wasn't so sad.

The oligarchs are very, very savvy about finances, but "seem" incompotent about their core business, because their core business is often not what they tell you it is, or they just don't care about efficiency, but about monopolies, subsidies and public funds.

"Oops we lost all of the public's money, sorry we were so incompetent, we're just human after all and didn't intend or plan to at all even though the half the money is now funnelled through hyper advanced financial schemes to Caribbean islands".

Twitter was quite in the red before he said he was going to buy it, he found out it was quite in the red and tried to back out, the SEC forced him to buy it, and everything since is a desperate attempt to float a sinking ship that was doomed from the beginning like cutting expenses (the people maintaining twitter).

Twitter would have been profitable that year if it wasn't for a one-time lawsuit settlement.

I'm more supprised that the people that actually forked up the cash to buy it arent more pissed. You'd have thought their contract has certain stipulations on performance.

it’s easy to attribute malice to what is done by sheer incompetence.

It's easy to attribute incompetence to what is done under the influence of drugs.

I wasn't being serious; I was saying he's doing such a good job destroying the company that you'd have to think it's on purpose because no one could be so dumb. I was being facetious.

It's useful for him to do everything wrong so humanity can either learn it's not wrong, or confirm it's wrong. He demonstrated we can go further with EVs and self-landing rockets. And he failed at a dozen other things. Sometimes someone's purpose in life is to show us the path. Sometimes it's to serve as a warning to others. Sometimes both.

Musk is a major military/intelligence contractor. Twitter was becoming a threat to the US national security state, imo. I agree with your thought re: Musk purposefully destroying Twitter.

And he fixed that threat by allowing Russian bots to have a blue badge next to their fake celebrity name, I mean good job.

Yet another way to destroy Twitter's brand and ultimately Twitter itself.

I'm not agreeing with the theory presented, but "what's good for the US national security state" and "what's good for the US population" are two separate things.

I’m not really understanding how Twitter was becoming a threat to the US national security state. That “fact” being true is the prerequisite to this particular conspiracy theory, and I don’t think it’s a strong theory. This was a US-based public company where TLAs can knock on their door anytime.

I think the explanation is far simpler: Elon fully controls Twitter and is doing whatever he wants. Whether he lost $50 billion on it is immaterial at this point: he’s so wealthy that it will take him no time at all to recover that kind of money.

With only ~20% of its original headcount, I have to assume Twitter is profitable, even if it lost half its advertising revenue.

Twitter is still commanding a huge user base: the number of people leaving Twitter just because of Elon being a baby is way overstated. There are probably, no exaggeration, hundreds of millions of Twitter users who have basically no clue who the guy is (especially outside the United States where 75% of Twitter users are located).

I don’t even think Elon’s vision for the product as a “super app” is all that dumb, it just depends on whether it’s something that can be successfully executed. For example, Instagram added direct shopping within their app and it’s been successful. That would be a great start for Twitter or X or whatever it is going to be.

> With only ~20% of its original headcount, I have to assume Twitter is profitable, even if it lost half its advertising revenue.

This is a terrible assumption. Not only do they have massive infrastructure cost but he also saddled the company with over $1 billion / year in interest costs on the loans he used to buy the company.

> Twitter was becoming a threat to the US national security state, imo.

I'm going to need a source for that one. That seems like the exact opposite of what actually happened prior to Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter.

Twitter was a threat to Donald Trump and those who allied with him, not the US national security state.

Per the "Twitter Files" that Elon Musk released upon gaining control Twitter effectively worked in concert with the Democrats, the FBI, and liberal media outlets.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairnes...

> Twitter was a threat to Donald Trump and those who allied with him, not the US national security state.

A threat to all of those in power, for the same exact reasons.

The posts you happened to see personally don't really have any relevance on the various power groups around the world that have had big leaks on the platform.

Did you not read my link? The Democrats, the FBI, Twitter, and liberal media colluded to work against Donald Trump.

Guess what...if you're on the side of the Democrats, the FBI, Social Media, and over 90% of traditional media companies, you're part of the establishment and the US national security state.

Donald Trump was the one that was considered a threat to the establishment.

I'm not debating the merits of Donald Trump as a person or as a politician, but literally the opposite of what is being asserted here in other comments is what happened.

I'm not here to talk about Donald Trump.

I'm just pointing out that you had it all mixed up. Twitter was allied with the national security state prior to Musk's acquisition, not opposed to them.

How does that impact, say, the Saudi ownership of Twitter?

Think broader, more completely.

"Twitter's former head of security is now blowing the whistle on the company. Peiter Zatko, also known by his hacker name Mudge, filed complaints with several government agencies. He accuses Twitter of serious security flaws that he says pose a risk to the platform's users, shareholders and national security. "

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/23/1119103584/whistleblower-says...

I wasn't actually thinking this though, I was being facetious. Just saying that Elon is running the company so comically poor that you'd have to think he's doing it on purpose. Not saying he -is- doing it on purpose, just that he is actually running the company -that- badly.

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