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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

He did it for twitter and it worked amazingly well. A lot of smart people scoffed at how there was no way he could run twitter with 80% fewer staff (here's a great example of the sentiment typical at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=22m20s). But Twitter is just fine.

If 80% of twitter was bloat, imagine government!

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How did it go "amazingly well"? In Musk's own words Twitter is barely breaking even[0].

Estimates by Fidelity say that about 80% of Twitter business value evaporated under Musk rule [1].

[0]https://www.business-standard.com/companies/news/elon-musk-x...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitte...

> How did it go "amazingly well"?

Extremely high site reliability (others claimed it would literally go down, have outages). And the eng team's ability to pump out features: https://x.com/nima_owji/status/1872708051494695422/photo/1

These metrics are irrelevant for business. If it means something for predicting Musk involvement in government it's this: there will be some meaningless metrics by which it will be declared a success.

No - the opposite (!) - these two metrics are not random or meaningless - they're precisely the metrics the 2022 naysayers said Twitter/Musk would fail on! - that is, these are the results according to the metrics of the naysayers!. If we wanted to select more favourable ones, we could. But these are the very metrics the 2022 haters claimed he'd flunk!

It's easy to add reliability to a system if you scale the interested userbase down. Which is exactly what Xitter is doing by pushing content far to the right, and making it a more hostile environment for discourse.

Like, yes, I can run a reliable system with 20% of the engineers if I'm aiming for 20% of the userbase and 20% of the quality of the platform that I was originally trying to run.

Debatably twitter had really smart people build systems that could operate without human intervention. So not really sure we want to say that was a success story for Elon Musk so much as he bought a software company where the software worked. Since the take over the product has gotten noticeably worse as far as reliability and with the algorithmic content promotion. The core functionality has stayed, but the overall experience has gotten worse.

I do basically agree with the concept that twitter is running without as many people as they had - it is in fact doing that. It's just doing worse than it was and has been a pretty poor business venture for its investors except those who were using it for its capabilities to influence... things appeared to work out for those people. So if the point of a business is to make money and the way they are supposed to do that is through a software product I would say the results are mixed at this moment.

Now so far as comparing the government to a software company... not sure thats really how we want to look at this or try to operate the government. Government is basically supposed to exist for market externalities - things the markets can't or shouldn't take care of. Is there bloat in the government? any sane adult can answer that question with a yes without even blinking... but theres also stuff thats easy to gut for savings that we need when shit hits the fan. Thats the stuff thats not so great to save money on.

Improving the government is a great thing and we should strive for it... I would just prefer ya know Congress do it since its their job and not an eccentric billionaire.

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