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Comment by bdw5204 | Hacker News Reader

That's basically the reputation of a significant number of private equity firms. Their standard operating procedure is to load the company up with debt, cut R&D, cut investment into the product, cut wages and raise prices to increase short-term profits while pretending you're trying to turn around the company and save it. That's basically why Sears and K-Mart don't exist anymore[0] and why so many newspapers fired their journalists and replaced most of the local news with national news from the wire services[1].

[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/investing/retail-sears-privat...

[1]: https://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/faculty-research/...

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Sounds like Twitter.

Elon's Twitter acquisition was exactly to do that but he muffed it.

Elon's twitter acquisition was a play to sell lots of incredibly overvalued TSLA stock without tanking the price.

May a lot of noise, declare you're done with Twitter's bots and BS, sell a ton of stock -- not because it's overhyped, no it's for Twitter -- and then back out of the sale.

And he would've gotten away except he tried to back out 3 times and they held him to it. So now he's got this trainwreck situation, and he's doing what he thinks is the right play, lemons into lemonade.

Everything except short-term profits. X seems decently focused on the long term, especially with subscriptions being introduced as a (new) revenue stream.

Also not sure about R&D, as I don't know what R&D Twitter was doing pre-acquisition, but there's been an extraordinary increase in the rate of addition of new features and changes to the platform.

> especially with subscriptions being introduced as a (new) revenue stream.

I don’t think that’s ever likely to offset the massive amounts of debt Musk offloaded to Twitter’s balance sheet to fund the acquisition.

> changes to the platform.

Likely one of the most horrible rebrandings in the history of corporate rebranding?

He fired the ML Ethics Transparency and Accountability team. They did a lot of high quality work on understanding bias in opaque ML models.

https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-ethical-ai-team/

Exactly. Most of the Twitter acquisition money was borrowed, and that debt is now sitting on the company's balance sheet as liabilities.

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