Doing this on a few weeks notice seems rather insane to me. Unless you have very good remote work options this is very disruptive for employees.
Build cult, treat like cult members.
I think people just generally don’t like being constantly fooled.
That's definitely not consistent; the SpaceX stuff may be always behind his schedule, but it does actually deliver, and even those delays are ahead of the rest of the entire industry planet-wide; and those cars he sells don't have FSD, but they do actually exist and are really electric (the sucess of electric cars over e.g. hydrogen wasn't a given even when he took over).
Directionally agreed though, he and his companies have achieved some really remarkable things. Makes the fall from grace, especially in such foreseeable ways (i.e. self-radicalizing on Twitter), all the more disappointing.
Neither of which matters; the SpaceX promises are still Musk's, and the pre-Musk Tesla was losing money on each sale (all <= 147 of them).
> Makes the fall from grace, especially in such foreseeable ways (i.e. self-radicalizing on Twitter), all the more disappointing.
Agreed.
To me, colonising Mars has a huge romantic appeal… but there's no way I'd want to be in a disconnected space habitat with an (orbital position dependent) 6-30 month return-to-Earth delay, if he's in charge of it.
Well, except the $30K Model 3, and the $35K CyberTruck (Musk can promise all he likes that it's coming next year, but I see it coming at all as a snowball's chance in hell).
[1] Though with the NYT reporting that the American ad revenues was down 80% to $114M/quarter since the acquisition it might not be so obvious.
* I know it's still not owned owned but there is still a legal difference between X Corp directly renting x.com (from Verisign) versus leasing x.com by a different owner (maybe Musk, maybe a holding corp) to X Corp.
[1] https://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/bankruptcy/bankruptc...
Debt service was estimated at ~$100m/mo, with the likelihood that rates on some of the debt could increase substantially since the financing was initially booked in mid 2022.
If these numbers are directionally accurate (and they do not report, so we don't know for sure), this thing is probably closer to losing a billion $ annually than to breakeven.
source?
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/elon-musk-has-a-huge-tw... and
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-twit...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-03/twitter-s...
If you don't like my choice of sources, any popular search engine will help you surface additional sources.
Assuming a rough interest rate of 10% to 15%, leaves 100million to 150million / month on debt alone.
> Assuming a rough interest rate of 10% to 15%
But market rates are well known and well published. CCC class loans were 10% in April 2022 when these deals were likely. So 10% to 15% covers the possible range of loans if you know much about the market.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAMLH0A3HYCEY
The higher end of 15% would be possible if the loans were finalized closer to May or June.
There is a big difference from Feb 2022 vs April 2022 though. But we know the rough timeline of Twitters acquisition as well as the rough timeline of when deals were signed. So I'm reasonably confident in an April 2022 deal.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAMLH0A3HYCEY
Looks like when he took down the financing, rates would have been in the 12% range. Possible some/all of the debt has been rolled over since then, possibly at higher rates.
I'm sure Elon can wipe those out himself, but it's still a lot of money that isn't accounted for. Twitter cannot merely float at barely profitability. Twitter needs at least $1.3 Billion/year to counteract interest payments.
Instead, Elon continues to make decisions like closing Twitters headquarters.
I think they actually did this so users are free to like whatever they want without having to worry about getting vilified for liking something that is not supported by the majority. For example liking something political or anti whatever.
Sometimes i find interesting twitter accounts or posts through likes, and that's now gone.
I'm sure real estate lawyers feel much the same about how rote their work is.
People pay for that, and it's valuable, but it does feel like these tasks should've been automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.
> it feels like a long time since I did more than convert someone else's Figma (or Adobe XD, or Photoshop document) into code, and glue it to a pre-existing API
That looks like webdev, that's like a minuscule part of all programming in question.
> automated away a decade ago, without LLMs.
I think LLMs is the worst part of it because literally what programmers do is used against them. It's like taxi drivers used to train self driving cabs to automate themselves out of jobs, except imagine self driving cars actually worked and there are no unions or protective gov regulation and taxi drivers all cheer for this because each thinks the whole firing and pay reduction is only for someone else not themselves:)
Mobile, even smaller.
> It's like taxi drivers used to train self driving cabs to automate themselves out of jobs
I was talking to a taxi driver pre-pandemic (from his passenger seat) who was enthusiastic about FSD even though it would end his career.
And if FSD AI don't perform some of their training by trying to predict what all the other cars will do, they're missing out on a huge opportunity.
More broadly, I think this pattern applies to all labour: surveillance is easy, humanoid robots exist.
> this pattern applies to all labour
Yup, that was the point of the taxi analogy.
It is why unions/gov protections/certifications exist... accountability and keeping society from unraveling
"Work" isn't Boolean — the self drive AI does exist, just not well enough to do everything and even the "F" (though the Waymo AI seems to be?)
The same quality may be worse or better in specific roles, but AI isn't stationary.
> It is why unions/gov protections/certifications exist... accountability and keeping society from unraveling
No, but it is why the Amish and literal communism existed — but in the latter case, they weren't opposed to the automation itself just the unfairness of using profit to make workers redundant.
Unions are more about fair pay for fair work, and safe conditions in that work. Certifications are consumer protection.
I am not against automation too. We all used autocomplete. But it is amusing to see people sawing off the branch on which they sit, encouraging each other to do so and spitting on people who point it out.
I don't believe in communism and I think anarchocapitalism is maybe as bad as communism.
> Certifications are consumer protection.
If you think certifications are just consumer protection then you are missing big part of the picture. In the end it is protection for every side.
> I don't believe in communism and I think anarchocapitalism is maybe as bad as communism.
I've met both, and yup; though the communists seemed more sociable, neither could really understand that the other existed except as caricature.
> If you think certifications are just consumer protection then you are missing big part of the picture.
I was unsure if I should have written "also" in that sentence; but I didn't write "just" ;)
Thanks, TIL!
Communists may be sociable but being a Russian I don't have a good impression from the ideology.
FWIW, I'm fairly sure the communists I know have a blind spot for all the failures of communist governments and not just the USSR's failures, they put Marx on a pedestal and insist the evidence to the contrary doesn't count somehow.
As I see equivalent blind spots in anarchocapitalism (any example of bad outcomes is dismissed as "not real free market"), that's why I don't think either communism or anarchocapitalism works.
At least in a conventional business that uses revenue to pay wages.
If an employee quits or is terminated due to not coming into work, then they are not eligible for unemployment benefits, and hence the business’s unemployment insurance premiums are unaffected.
That's a pretty dramatic collapse.
The thing about Infra - is that if all you want is 99% uptime - that's, with reasonable architectural decisions - relatively straightforward. You can run with a skeleton crew (particularly if you make really smart Infra Decisions like Midjourney, Whatsapp, others have done an outsource 95%+ of your infra to a third party (Discord, Platform Messaging APIs).
As time goes on though, and you go through incident review after incident review, and sharpen things up - and 99% becomes 99.9% you start to get diminishing returns on more Infra Employees - at some point they don't add much reliability value (but boy do they make pager rotation schedules pretty nice).
My sense (from both interviewing and working with them) is that the vast majority of people fired/laid off from Twitter weren't (for the most part - definitely lots of exceptions) core engineers or core infra-people -they were people on the periphery associated with making Twitter a friendly place for advertisers, and just maintaining a healthy work-life balance for the Infra people - a job where you could work your 30-32/hours week without it becoming all encompassing.
When they were fired, Twitter became a very unfriendly place, and the advertisers ran away, and the revenue crashed.
I still don't understand why Musk believes he can dictate to his customers who they should do business with. I can kind of understand regulating what vendors do when interacting, particularly with (for the most part) completely powerless customers caught up in monopolies. But I'm looking forward to digging into the theory of law which suggests that vendors can regulate who/what type of business their customers do.
I've heard of Monosopny's - but it just doesn't feel like there is a "single buyer" in this scenario - and, companies are really, really profit seeking - if there was an opportunity for them to make a lot of money by advertising on Twitter/X, and increasing their revenue, and therefore their stock - I challenge you go find me 1 CFO/VP Marketing in 100 who wouldn't jump at the chance. Their political views would be irrelevant.
The problem is - when all these trust and safety and advertising people were let go -their was nobody left to reassure those CFO/VP Marketing types that something horrible wouldn't happen to their brand on Twitter/X. So they just decided to play it safe until things shook out.
The whole notion that Twitter is owed a share of advertising spend (based on what?) is absurd.
Aside from that, there's the lawsuit the sibling mentioned, plus the coordinated campaigns from groups like Media Matters and others attempting to scare advertisers away.
Tesla makes double what GM makes with a 1/3 of the revenue. Twitter was always a money loser. If they made $661M in revenue, but lost 700m, and now they make $114M a quarter with $80M in profits, i wouldn't call that a dramatic collapse but rather a dramatic revival.
Quote profit not revenue when it comes to Elon Companies.
Assuming all $114M is profit, Elon dropped what, $43B on this?
Which ever way you look at it, it looks pretty bad.
> Quote profit not revenue when it comes to Elon Companies.
Notably, the company does not release audited financials anymore. If the company were able to go from breakeven to netting 80% margins, great. But nobody should believe such a turnaround without evidence.
Separately, if the company were netting $320mm annually (using your hypothetical), AND we assign the P/E of best-in-class Meta (which is growing, not shrinking), the company would be worth $8B[1]. Under these generous assumptions, Musk has presided over a $36B (82%) destruction of value in under 2 years.
1 - That's not accounting for the outstanding debt used to finance the deal. Including that makes the value of the enterprise negative.
But if you get rid of all of it at the same time, it might be tough to see the difference from the outside.
Well, they just outsourced everything to cheap devs in India and things kept rolling. No new features and some new bugs, but most things work.
Turns out you don't really need that much to keep lights on.
a) slowly lose to competitors as you can't keep up with increased demands in the space. b) take on more and more existential risks
For a lot of companies, that is exactly what they want to do. Its called the exploit phase, I forgot what business lingo this came from. Do a practical feature freeze, cut costs to the max, and squeeze all the value out the product for as long as it lives. Informally known as enshittification. Its all about cost-cutting rather than market capture.
You can last a while though, especially because there aren't many changes so there's also less operational risk.
Funny thing is that I took the opposite side of that bet. I figured Elon would slash things that people thought were important but actually weren't, and make it more efficient. It's mostly played out, except that the site is still rickety. But maybe from a business perspective that's not important, which is a shame for us.
From a moderation point of view, Twitter arguably did collapse. The technical side is not all there is to it when running social media.
Musk didn't buy Twitter to make money or learn how to run a successful business. "Keep on trucking" isn't what Twitter is supposed to be doing right now. 20% workforce is more than enough to run the operation in maintenance mode, which is exactly what's being asked for.
How many dev-ops roles would it take to just keep the lights on at your org? A dozen? Three? You certainly wouldn't have a need for decision-makers or heavy lifters.
If Twitter ever gets a competitor with some traction it'll be dead in months because it won't be able to react. It seems like new social networks aren't a thing any more though so it's probably quite safe.
2014 1.4
2015 2.2
2016 2.5
2017 2.4
2018 3
2019 3.4
2020 3.7
2021 5
2022 4.4
2023 3.4
2015 304
2016 313
2017 310
2018 298
2019 312
2020 347
2021 362
2022 401
2023 421
Further, the brand has been tainted and Threads was allowed to pop up. Now threads is around 1/4 to 1/3 the size of Twitter MAU. It may not have replaced Twitter, but the door has been opened and that seems like an unforced error.
This election season looks poised to further drive long term disengagement as the platform is going to be very toxic and very unmoderated.
Otoh, profit might actually be up - if revenues are down 50% but costs down 80%, it may make more money. I suspect, like other private equity investments, this will not work for too long. With how much Musk has put his personal brand onto the site, it may also be difficult to unload the pieces at a profit as per the normal PE playbook.
Check the actual graphs! It went down by 50% briefly, but then increased again. It's still lower than before, but not by that much.
The brand was never not tainted. Twitter has long been known as one of the cesspools of the Internet, actively contributing to the degradation of the social fabric. It would be a great blessing if Elon did actually kill it the way his detractors predicted. Twitter delenda est.
Main thing I consume on X nowadays is space journalism. Plenty of big name space journalists seriously posting on X (e.g. Jeff Foust, Eric Berger). I had a look at Threads, I can't find any of that content, mostly just people posting silly memes and mind-numbingly misinformed takes on the topic, at best people just reposting stuff that you'll already find better coverage of on X.
> This election season looks poised to further drive long term disengagement as the platform is going to be very toxic and very unmoderated.
I don't find much "toxic" on X. If you only read stuff posted by people you follow, and are selective in who you follow, you can have a pretty curated experience.
So... you mean the bot detection is now more broken?
That is obviously in decline but does alone not capture how much worse off the company is today than before the acquisition. In 2022, the company did $4.4B in revenue and had negligible debt. In 2023, the company possibly had debt service payments in the range of $1.2B for the year. If you back out the mandatory debt service, 2023 looks more like $2B in topline.
Put another way: Twitter 2022 was significantly more capital-efficient than Twitter 2024.
Similarly, one can run a simple model of the value of the company now. Once you include the $13B in outstanding debt, you will end up with a negative number.
Yes, this business is currently in "collapse."
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1820849880283107725?s=46&t=alZ...
There's no mystery here. The company cut Trust & Safety so that people could post whatever they want under the guise of "free speech." This means more objectionable (to advertisers) content on the site. Advertisers do not want to run ads next to objectionable content.
Worse, Twitter was never big enough to really matter to big ad spenders. So it's small, doesn't have the ability to move the needle for any big advertiser, and now CMOs/ad agencies have to worry about their ads being run next to 4chan-quality posts? Easy decision to stop spending there. There's really no conspiracy involved here.
At base, this is a simple conflict of ideas. Twitter management wants to create a space where people can post ideas that may be broadly seen as objectionable, even if they are legal. Big advertisers are well-known for restricting their ads to more sanitized spaces (this practice predates the Internet). The goals of Twitter management are directly in conflict with the goals of big advertisers. This was the obvious way for this situation to unfold.
They just auto-banned everyone who downloaded their new Mac app so... no
Edit:
This, I guess: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/x-kills-its-mac-app-ac...
the anti musk shit on this site is counter to logic and ideological
Getting the pixels on people's screens is the easy part. Keeping the Nazis and bots at bay is the expensive part. You have to do the latter if you want to keep the advertisers on your site, which is why X switched to a more for-pay model and still loses money hand over fist. Being able to pay to have your voice amplified has been a real boon for the fascist users on X, they're having a great time.
X has also gotten very bad about amplifying misinformation, especially on white supremacist topics. Just yesterday (maybe the day before?) that bullshit old paper that said sub-Saharan Africans had an average IQ of 55 made it to the top of the feed with no community notes. The comment section was full of great replacement theory blue check guys all agreeing with one another and making it sound like there was a consensus. People see stuff like this and actually believe it. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if Elon himself re-Xed it at some point.
That being said, I've enjoyed it since the takeover. It still seems very similar to what it used to be, but feels very much like I'm seeing it from both ends now. For every crazy right leaning comment there are plenty of crazy leftists that counter, and vice versa.
I don' think that's completely true - MAUs are up this year, and hit 500M for the first time last Oct...
[1] https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-sha...
I'm not sure what you're talking about, can you fill me in a little bit?
Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds.
He is suing a literal cartel after their crime was exposed in congress.
Yeah, congress "exposed" it, when it's right on their website (https://wfanet.org/leadership/garm/about-garm)
This is just another of Musk's "free speech for me, but not for you" lawsuits that never go anywhere and are designed to waste your money with lawyers.
Is this the illegal cartel boycott you're talking about?
Would it not be an expression of free speech and advertisers' choice to disassociate from another entity, seen through the lens of Musk's famous free speech absolutism combined with corporate personhood? At worst, wouldn't it be the invisible hand of the free market acting to telegraph reduced demand in a resource by its previous consumers?
You pretended to be unaware of the situation then you straight up lie to push the dishonest narrative.
You support censorship.
This site literally bans anyone who defends conservative positions.
There’s nothing more hypocritical than leftists pretending to care about human rights.
I’m not going to indulge pretending otherwise.
You cannot lie your way into moral superiority.
They claim to be the last bastion of free speech, but when advertisers exercise their free speech and go advertise someplace else, suddenly that's unacceptable.
Same way Elon goes on and on about how they won't moderate hate speech and will only ever delete content if it's illegal by law, 'cause "otherwise it'd be censorship". But then with the legal and publicly available information posted by ElonJet, that was different and everybody who ever mentioned it was banned.
This is squarely in conspiracy theory territory, but doesn't really justify the thought that association between any group of private entities could be compelled.
> You pretended to be unaware of the situation then you straight up lie to push the dishonest narrative.
I think this may have been in reference to another commenter.
> You support censorship.
I literally have spent much of my career on teams trying to find technical workarounds to online censorship in dictatorial regimes. What Musk's Twitter stands for these days is closer to the censorship seen in those places than it was before Musk took over.
I'll also add that what the US Right often decries as censorship is... jarringly hypocritical, at best. I won't get started on here.
> This site literally bans anyone who defends conservative positions.
Summarily incorrect. I don't know that there have been any high-profile bans since I joined, but HN does delete conversations where people who aren't constructively participating in the thread are. It wouldn't surprise me if this thread got removed, for example.
I'm not going to entertain your remaining points since those aren't really substantial enough to even talk about.
This would be a bad look for a company that cared about how it looks.
Somehow I think the group of people who choose to live in SF have particular interests and desired amenities that make high rent worth it. E.g., walkable and lively neighborhoods, access to parks, events, etc.
Moving the office is probably neutral or better for people on the Penisula. And may be neutral for parts of the East Bay. Depends on where exactly in San Jose the new office is too.
Also, I was surprised by how light traffic was when I drove from Mountain View to SF last October during what I was expecting to be the morning rush hour. I don't recall what the reverse direction looked like, though.
But my point was kind of to raise the likelyhood that this action was taken without regard for how it looks, and without regard for required notifications.
reading xitter today is worse than daytime television.
contributing to it's content pool is just counter intuitive.
Do you think it's a problem that people are coddled in bubbles?
People aren't getting educational and uplifting material shoved into their feeds.
I find using Twitter in the "following" mode, as opposed to the default "for you", I get a lot of value content and almost no noise.
/shrug
My partner has the same. …but, to be fair, who knows what different variants of the platform are given to different people in different regions at different times.
Should they have more or less eyeballs witnessing them, and responding to them?
I'd rather see what they are saying directly vs. seeing other articles about him that are most likely propaganda nowadays with how corrupted the media currently is, hence partly why ELon felt compelled to buy Twitter-X to begin with.
But fair enough, blocking him then could make sense.
I can understand why most wouldn't want to work at Twitter, sorry X, but if you're young with few obligations, I can see people doing it just for the experience of it, at least for a year or two. It has to be an insane ride to be on.
Or maybe I'm just thoroughly unlikable.
Does it still apply if the company offers relocation benefits and a reasonable time for (say) school transfers?
The building manager stopped any and all proceedings against X for the two months of alleged unpaid rent.
Not all delinquencies may have reached the level of lawsuit, either, while still being a problem.
Not a certainty, but a real possibility.
You realize Teams is pre-installed on like every windows machine, right? that's literally all you need for remote work. And most people agree that remote works is preferable/more more productive
Effective remote work is as much, if not more, a social and collaboration problem, as it is a technological problem.