Ask HN: What if Elon Musk is tanking Twitter on purpose?

Tesla and SpaceX have physical products. Twitter isn’t, it’s an advertising platform. That’s very different.

Tesla engineers didn’t have any options for similar companies to go to (until recently). Not a lot of rocketry companies out there either. Programmers have TONS of jobs. You can’t push them around so easily.

He had a very clear executable vision for Tesla he could articulate and motivate with. Same with SpaceX. No one knows what his Twitter plans are out side of “make it better”. But no one knows what that means, so it’s hard/impossible to follow. And he’s not articulating it.

Frankly it’s incredibly clear he doesn’t understand the product. Users don’t like Twitter, they like other Twitter users. So you have to be real careful not to drive them away. You know what advertisers don’t care about? Twitter. They like twitter users.

His changes to verification/Twitter Blue showed he didn’t know what the point of verification was (something many get wrong). That plus the terribly executed initial layoffs (and general uncertainty) destroyed moral and trust.

If he wasn’t running at 200 MPH his decisions might work. I haven’t heard anyone defending Twitter’s old headcount. But the way he went about layoffs was super counterproductive. Twitter Blue sucked, but using it to ruin verification was moronic.

Everything after that just reeks of desperation.

There’s no master plan. There’s no 4D chess. He went out in a ledge he shouldn’t have been on unprepared and is now trapped with everyone watching him fall.

Read this thread. It made a ton of sense to me.

https://twitter.com/drskyskull/status/1593465921498144769

Remember some things he discussed in his messages, like Twitter becoming a protocol and essentially acting as infrastructure like a phone company that doesn't care what you are talking about as long as you pay your bills?

Yeah, that's not happening because he spent tens of billions of his personal wealth, got other investors whose motives might not be as pure, loaded the company with debt that has yearly interest payments larger than the profits of the company in good times and the "pay $8" thing didn't work well.

He simply can't keep Twitter in the form he purchased Twitter, so he is shaking it down to try make something out of it. He will try all kinds of things until something works or Twitter shuts down. Not doing this and keeping Twitter the way he purchased it means Twitter shuts down eventually anyway and without anything to show for the money he spent.

What could he get that would be enough to offset all that?

He could have just turned off Twitter in other countries that didn’t want it. He could have run it with Chinese style censorship. He could have manipulated the conversation. He could have flat out backdoored it for them.

Why was it necessary to destroy it? Why would that be the preferred outcome?

Makes no sense.