I get ads on X that are just videos of animals being slowly shot multiple times to death. There's also some for tools to slim jim car locks. None of the mainstream/normal accounts I used to follow (shout out SwiftOnSecurity) are there, and instead it's a hotbed of crypto scams and deranged vitriol. The site is still running, but is a shell of its former self, making so little money that Elon is trying to sue people (and now, abusing US govt payment systems) to force them to pay him for advertising.
I can see how if you think that's a success, that you would think similar actions with regard to the US government are successful. The necessary cuts he's making are not necessary, and I'm guessing you aren't impacted, so, given the general lack of theory of mind towards others, I'm not surprised you think they're ok. The rest of us out there who understand the idea of human suffering are concerned for our fellow citizens facing arbitrary and unnecessary pain as the result of a capricious court eunach's drug influenced decisions before the "restabilization" that will never happen.
Moreover, scientific R&D is a strange place to slash if cost savings are the goal. Medicare and Medicaid comprise over 50 times the NIH and NSF combined budget of approximately $50B. If we want to save costs, research into diseases like Alzheimer’s Disease is the way to go. Alzheimer’s currently costs the nation $412B per year [1], eight times the NIH annual budget. Therapies which delayed the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease by 20 years would nearly eliminate this cost.
Let’s be clear: DOGE is led by a self described autist who has little idea how government and broader society functions. The damage he will do if left unchecked is vast.
And to the extent Twitter is still limping along it’s because Twitter due to its very nature benefits immensely from the stickiness of social networks.
For example, Facebook is almost completely junk. It hasn’t improved or been relevant in a long time. And yet it survives and makes tons of money simply because people don’t want to rebuild their networks.
There are many other examples where even minor cuts have been devastating. The classic example is of course GE, the ultimate example of cutting a company to the bone, which worked for a decade or so, but set the company up to essentially cease to exist after.
Then you have Boeing, a company in an industry with less competition than probably any other in the world and it’s struggling to make money because of this thinking.
I asked ChatGPT 4o for other examples, and it generated a list of 40. You can do that for yourself, if you're interested.
Twitter hardly ever made money before and after is in the same state now. Its contribution (anything?) to this country is far different than a government institution.
The comparison here isn’t encouraging and makes no sense.
Online ad revenue has been growing, 15% per year recently. Huge growth. That includes legacy networks like (decrepit) Facebook, which is seeing double digit growth, and the short form video frontier is growing considerably faster and constantly pushing out new ad/partnership models and is very much a strong growth industry in an of itself.
Ad revenue is more than sufficient to sustain a billion dollar corporation. It can and does sustain trillion dollar corporations, and the industry is currently in a strong growth phase with a lot of obvious green fields for innovation.
Twitter was an imperfect yet functional website before Elon. Elon fired most of the staff. Twitter then continued to be an imperfect yet functional website.
Hell, I remember ten years of HN saying "WTF does Twitter need so many people for??", and then those same people said "OMG Elon is insane to fire so many people!!".
A glaring recent example. If Biden had taken action like Trump has to negotiate with Russia to stop the Ukraine war, would the Democrats be screaming that Biden is a “Putin apologist”?
If Barrack Obama made statements about deporting undocumented immigrants (which he did), Democrats fall largely silent. If Trump makes similar statements, same Democrats scream fascism, racism, and Nazi/white supremacy.
Twitter could be massively profitable, or woefully unprofitable ... it has no impact on anyone outside investors.
This is not the stunning retort to criticisms of Elon’s “fire them all” approach that some imagine it to be. It basically says “we cut expenses by 75% and only lost half our business.” Which half of the US government are you willing to lose, and are you sure you’re cutting the right 75% to lose the targeted half? Which half of the subjects that we fund R&D for are you willing to lose?
Increasing EBITDA by downscaling the business and severely cutting expenses is a common approach when turning around an unprofitable company.
We can quote secondary sources back at each other all day, but it's somewhat pointless because the truth is what I said already: EBITDA and revenue are merely indicators for cash flow, not synonyms. You used the wrong words dude.
I also noticed you only replied on a pedantic point while leaving the substantive questions on which half of the government and research funding you'd like to see gone (and how these cuts target that half) as an exercise for the reader.
The question we are talking about is whether Twitter makes more money now versus before Musk's take over. If "makes more money" means revenue, then the answer is a definitive no, it does not make more money now. If "makes more money" means profit, then the answer is that we don't know but probably not because profit is found after ITDA (hence the B in EBITDA) and we know the ITDA is substantial for Twitter given how it was acquired.
So yes there is a difference between cash flow and EBITDA that is germane here, and the difference is that cash flow doesn't help us answer the question that we are asking while the one piece of information that we do have (revenue) tells us the opposite of the answer you're trying to imply.
Let alone that we’re talking about comparing an advertiser based social network to a government institution.
Great euphemism for “In one month, we’re going to kill tens of millions by withholding food/medical care and permanently destroy institutions that took a century to build”.
I’m going to use that phrase.
Meanwhile, the companies Musk built that actually have dominated their space are big idea innovators like Tesla and SpaceX. Musk wasn’t successful because he’s a good penny pincher, he was successful by burning cash on big ideas and talented people.
But somehow we decided its case 1 that we’ll apply to the government.
Sure, if we detonate all nukes, I imagine 20% of humanity will survive. "We" won't die out that easily. Me and you are probably dead, though. Statistically speaking.
[0]: <https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...>
US Government is not Twitter, but yeah, I can see some element of it. Now I suddenly remember, the various comments here convinced me that X/Twitter will be dead in just two months. Yet, it's still around. Not that I care to make account there or bother looking at it, but I figure if it kept crashing, it would show up in the news. Maybe everyone moved to bluesky and it just doesn't have any customers?
Digg is still alive. Myspace is still alive. These big brands don't literally die often; someone will want to try and play around with it.
>but I figure if it kept crashing, it would show up in the news. Maybe everyone moved to bluesky and it just doesn't have any customers?
Twitter is technically stable in terms of servers. They did a good job doubling up by 1) minimizing the load needed by making users sign in to see more than a literal permalink (you can't even see comments anymore) while 2) being a bait to get more new accounts to report on engagement. Not that that matters now since Twitter is no longer publicly traded.
It's the everything else around it that caused it to plummet.
I can attack my own interpretation, that seems fair, doesn't it? You can have your own interpretation, and then attack it, (or not attack it) later.
> Digg is still alive. Myspace is still alive. These big brands don't literally die often
I had no idea! That's cool. I never really used either one that much. I do know yahoo is still around. One difference is I periodically I see links to X/Twitter. I never see people link to digg or myspace. But sounds like you have a different perspective, which is also cool.
> dismiss the truth because it's not literally dead?
Just to be clear, the truth for me is my impression from reading HN about 2022 or so. Namely from comments like these:
> (Nov 18, 2022) I very much doubt that. Twitter must have had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat. I'd be extremely surprised if Twitter(as in, the website/app, not the registered legal entity) still exists and works by the end of this year.
I agreed to them at the time. So not sure how "truth" and "dismissing" applies; it's really just an impression. Am I allowed to dismiss my own impression? Seems odd to object to that...
Your comment just gave some vibes that because Twitter didn't literally die 2 years ago (as you and others predicted) that it seems that introspection was completely proven wrong, "Yet, it's still around". I just simply wanted to assert that being nearly dead doesn't exactly inspire confidence, even though the doctor was technically disproven by his statement of "you'll be dead in 6 months".