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Comment by tomcar288 | Hacker News Reader

I like the fact that the author gives so many valuable tips on how to play this situation.

There's an even bigger over supply of labor now more than ever. So, META is using this to their advantage. The author states that this strategy is short sighted and will show future attrition from Meta because eventually the industry demand for SWE will recover. I'm just not sure about that last part. Musk has shown that you can profitably run a software company with 80% less staff. I would imagine other companies will aspire to this goal as well, especially now that the days of crazy growth are over. We're no longer in a growth economy anymore.

EDIT: I have not confirmed that X is profitable. And I don't know their numbers. but, I assumed after laying off 70 to 80% of staff, it probably should be right?

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I think that Twitter is an anomaly that shows the strength of the architecture they built. Certainly you don't need those people around to keep the lights on, but if you want to attract new users with new features, someone needs to design those to work at scale, and then implement them. As far as I can tell, X has basically added subscriptions since the acquisition. In the meantime, they've lost many users and advertisers. (I only see ads for drop-shipped crap, which probably isn't too profitable compared to someone like Disney.) It is very unclear whether this is sustainable for X; as tech debt accumulates and real debt becomes due, the situation could be pretty dire. With equity you are strongly encouraged to grow. With debt you have to grow faster than the interest payments or you're literally dead. It is unclear to me whether or not X is growing; a lot of people are at the very least supplementing X with Bluesky and Mastodon. (They say they've moved away, but I kind of doubt it.)

Musk would probably be the last person on Earth to admit that X isn't doing so well, so I wouldn't really trust him. The most insightful thing he's said is "Fuck you, Bob Iger" which doesn't sound particularly indicative of advertising success. Meanwhile, he's advertised X payments, X email, etc. and these have not materialized (much like "FSD is a year away" in ... 2017).

AFter 15 years, what could they possibly that would actually add to the bottom line? I mean, craigslist never seemed to add a single feature and yet they dominated for well over a decade and then some.

For some products, at some point it makes sense to hunker down and go into maintenance mode. Not every business can keep growing exponentially.

I agree with that. But you don't borrow 44 billion dollars from a bank to buy a company in maintenance mode.

I think Elon's vision is to make X an "everything platform" like they have in China. Someone is going to have to type in a lot of code to make that happen.

X is not profitable, as you can tell because its bank owners keep writing down the value of their investments.

> Musk has shown that you can profitably run a software company with 80% less staff

Is this a fact? Now that x is private do we know if they are profitable or not?

Musk didn't buy Twitter to make it profitable. He bought because he felt freedom of speech was being cratered by the previous owners and moderators of the platform.

He offered to buy it because he was mad at one of his kids for changing their gender, and then got stuck because he couldn't get out of the offer.

Freedom of speech then got worse because he fired all the legal team.

Is Musk turning a profit? And is he required to share honest numbers?

Musk claimed they were on a path to profitability (i.e. not currently profitable) and that was before he scared off more advertisers by claiming that Jews were scheming to replace white people with immigrants.

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