Twitter Worth Only Third of Elon Musk's Purchase: Fidelity | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Worth Only Third of Elon Musk's Purchase: Fidelity

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21 pointslxm28 comments

In the name of workers rights: good. I hope it decreases more.

I've met a lot of people who were employed at Twitter, and the description "Worker" applies to very few of them.

How do you mean?

Twitter added very few features in the last few years despite having a massive amount of staff. Many belive twitter had too high a headcount for the amount of revenue they made compared to other social media sites, and that those who did work there couldn't possibly have a full day of work on their schedules seeing as how twitter never did anything

There was that Project Veritas expose that revealed a Senior Engineer at Twitter did 4 hours of work per week and he said everyone else did the same thing.

It makes perfect sense because when Jack was part time CEO of Twitter he was known to spend less than a full work day at the company per week. Productivity tends to trickle down, it's contagious.

Much like a super high performer on a team tends to lift 1x engineers on the team to 1.5x - 2x engineers, I've observed.

Parag Agrawal as a CTO shipped essentially zero features. In fact, Twitter got noticeably worse over the years. Periscope and Vine were genuine innovations, both cast to the side.

You could get to the truth by reading between the lines in the whistleblower report after they fired Mudge, whom Jack brought in as an infosec consultant. I'd suggest reading it, it's quite an eye opener to pre-Musk Twitter. Notably their security culture was described as being 10 years behind industry standards, over half of their nearly 500,000 servers were running unpatched OSes that were EOL and no longer receiving updates, over 25% of employee computers had security updates disabled, etc. Over half their employees had access to prod. It reads like the dumpster fire you would expect from a year 1 startup yet their literal army of essential, irreplaceable, webshit cybergeniuses allowed all this to happen under their watch. Any rational person would read this and conclude, "What were these people doing all day?"

Why do new features need to be added? Like one of the worst obsessions a developer or team can have is to add new features for the sake of it, breaking things that people took for granted or torpedoing other efforts.

A lot of Twitters headcount was specifically devoted to serving certain regions. For example, Twitter had integration with multiple different game services and specific regional functionality. They had a large API that they had to maintain, update and respond to dev requests.

A lot of what happens isn't visible.

He means they were overpaid wankers who went to the office to mostly socialize and take advantage of free gourmet food. This isn't hyperbole, these people proudly documented it on their social media accounts and I've seen the footage.

The fact that Twitter hasn't gone completely offline in a fireball as predicted over and over by these same people itself proves they were redundant.

Employing too many people in jobs that aren't productive is bad. Given the allegedly high skill of many of these people, it's much better for them to be reallocated to more productive, more valuable roles.

Twitter was a failing company. Cursing them with too many employees isn't good for anyone.

First off: it seems like the many employees at Twitter did have a positive impact on the company, considering the many issues it has been facing since this was reduced. I know that it was a common refrain that Twitter was completely over-staffed, but how do we actually know?

Second: the issues regarding worker rights go much further than simply laying off many employees.

- Laying employees off while promising severance, then never paying that

- Making employees fly in on extremely short notice just because the owner wants them to

- Reneging on previous contractual agreements (e.g. remote work) just to get them to quit

- Forcing the remaining employees to work way longer than is necessary, even setting up beds in the offices

People deserve stability and normal treatment. A billionaire manchild should not be able to make their lives this bad just because they want to!

Not everything reduces to monetary value. And I'm guessing the person with almost the most monetary value on the planet has a better position than most to perceive that. I honestly think he's doing this as what someone on Substack will eventually call anti-enshittification; buy enshittified platforms at personal expense and remediate them to serve what they directly perceive as the public good rather than the bottom line. Of course, publicly stating that you're planning to lose money on an investment will cause heads and credit ratings to explode, so it'll likely always be ambiguous when it occurs. Or he could just be an impulsive idiot that consistently makes poor business decisions. I don't know.

for being "anti-enshittifying" he sure has enshittified the platform rapidly

https://archive.is/6HjAt - https://archive.ph/6HjAt - https://archive.vn/6HjAt - https://archive.md/6HjAt

Doesn't this mean that it has only decreased approximately as much as the market since the offer was made? Makes sense, if so.

Which market are you referring to that has declined to 1/3 of its value?

The market has not lost 66% approximately in 1 year, that would be a catastrophic decline.

1/3rd is generous. It's not going to go offline. But now it's in a failed social network afterlife like MySpace.

Musk apparently didn't grasp the basic nature of what he was buying.

Twitter is/was primarily an advertising platform. Advertising is not "free speech" but rather the opposite of it.

Advertising may use technology but technology is not the real focus. It is really a social and psychological and political/public persuasion operation.

Catering to misfits and outcasts and extremists is an unbelievably bad way to promote advertising. Very few businesses want to be associated with Nazis --- even those run by ideological fascists.

Bottom line: Musk is particularly ill suited for the business he bought into. He has no one to blame but himself.

“musk’s” is a bit misleading. that was the point of the purchase.

the value of twix is not monetary, nor is it universal. but it is massive. for those that actually own it, the paper loss is unimportant compared to the people gain.

> who on earth would want elon musk as a figurehead?

who might benefit from installing a clown at the top of their surveillance apparatus? having him spew whatever comes to mind really grabs the attention away from those that hold the purse strings.

It is a massive fuckup. There is no 4-dimensional chess happening. Elon thought he could flip Twitter at less cost than litigation and a judgement against him. That was an impulsive decision with zero planning.

musk isn’t the one benefitting the most from this.

Who among us hasn't made an impulsive decision with zero planning that cost is $44 billion? Just him? Hm.

Yet the site is so much better than it used to be for the average user. The algorithm doesn’t feel hostile to rational thought anymore.

And he’s got millions of people paying to use the site now. But I guess maybe that isn’t making up for ad revenue losses? The article is paywalled so I don’t know how they reached their conclusions.

> The algorithm doesn’t feel hostile to rational thought anymore

Really? When people are reporting actually seeing CP and more Nazi BS?

People have been reporting CP on Twitter for years and have shown evidence that old Twitter ignored. From what I’ve seen, new Twitter seems to be doing a better job of scrubbing that stuff.

What Nazi bs are you referring to? Only thing I’ve seen is a couple silly Russian fanboys calling Ukraine a Nazi country.

Are you being purposefully obtuse? Even Musk himself responded to the allegations of more nazi stuff on twitter, and by threatening to sue the ADL for reporting on it and bringing it to the attention of advertisers...

As to the CP, didn't musk let go of the team handling that? Twitter is a huge online platform, obviously CP being on it isn't new, so I don't think you are giving me a fair reading by pointing this out. I'm referring to an increase in it. obviously, we both know this. I don't know what you look for on twitter that would lead you to your conclusion, you can explain that on your own. from the reporting I've seen (I don't go looking for porn on twitter, let alone CP), there is an increase, and in some cases it even is tolerated by twitter management: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/07/27/twitter-...

just going to /r/twitter on reddit will give you tons of threads about there being more CP on twitter, so I'm not really "seeing it" your way.

edit: and for what it's worth, I've used instagram for over 10 years and I've NEVER seen CP on it

I have never seen such abhorrent things as you've described, and it is meaningfully better in my experience.

Money down the xitter. Elon's Folly is a toxic dump of wasted potential.

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