Hacker News Reader

Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> Everything about this rebranding has been baffling to me. First, the original brand was great and pretty much untarnished, and there was no split/merger of business happening that would encourage it. There doesn't seem to be a business purpose to rename it.

Stated goal is to gradually transform it into an “everything app” — https://theconversation.com/elon-musk-aims-to-turn-twitter-i...

View on HN

First, fire 80% of developers. Then, make the remaining developers create an "everything app" (in addition to the workload they already have with the Service Formerly Known As Twitter app). Something, something. Profit ???

Aside from being a long-standing obsession of Musk's, the thing about the 'everything app' is that it's the Hail Mary move which could make the Twitter thing anything but a dumpster fire immolating $20b+, Musk's reputation, and several years of his rapidly-shortening QALYs. If you force as many people as possible to subscribe, you can then flip them to the 'everything app' and bootstrap a big enough bloc of customers to matter that you control their demand. (cf. Stratechery).

It's not going to work, but it is the only story you can tell yourself and employees about how the Twitter saga ends in any way other than Musk losing interest and getting distracted by AI again and Twitter spiraling into the drain and possibly being dumped into bankruptcy by its debt load.

Doesn’t a bankrupt Twitter lead to someone else buying it for a fire sale price that presumably could just change it back to … Twitter?

Yes.

>it's the Hail Mary move which could make the Twitter thing anything but a dumpster fire immolating $20b+

While Twitter wasn't making money hand over fist, it was bringing in $4,500million in ad revenue prior to the rebrand and had years where it was marginally profitable.

Musk's saddling Twitter with interest on the debt he paid to buy the company is one of the reasons it's immolating money.

Yeah, that's the problem. Buying it was so bad an idea and so overpriced that he had to load the blue bird down with debt. He can't just quit Twitter and toodle off and say 'well, I stopped wokeism, and that justifies destroying my reputation and 3 years even as my other ventures like Tesla run into major strategic problems while I was distracted'. So right now, Twitter is "default dead", as pg might put it. There is a viable business there... but not one that can service the Musk debt load indefinitely while enduring all the usual shocks & risks. So he's either got to put in a lot more money, tell a story which will get someone else to put in a lot more money, or lose it.

I think the "everything app" already exists. It's called a web browser.

WeChat users will tell you something else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat

Reply on news.ycombinator.com