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Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

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Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#421

Post by brundolf »

ilamont wrote: post #262
kyledrake wrote: post #189

I've been using Twitter since it's main novelty was that it was a successful Ruby on Rails app, and honestly I've been trying to figure out where the exit is for my personal use of Twitter lately. If the acquisition goes through, Twitter won't make enough money to service it's debt, and the things they will do to fix that are pretty much guaranteed to lower the quality of the platform, which frankly has never worked…

> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. This is key. If @dang suddenly threw up his hands and said "anything goes on HN within U.S. law" this wonderful virtual discussion forum would die and most of us would sign off forever. I say that as someone whose be…

I'm not sure the comparison holds up. Twitter right now doesn't moderate content, really, it only does anything about outright scams, misinformation, etc. Toxicity can mostly run wild and free. Whereas HN has various moderation mechanisms that seek to decrease the amount of low-quality interaction.

I.e., I think dropping all moderation from HN would have a much bigger effect than doing the same on Twitter

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#422

Post by Bubble_Pop_22 »

adventured wrote: post #322
SamBam wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still confuses me that being part-owner of an old dot-com payment company, part-owner of a mid-sized car company (by number of cars sold), and part-owner of a (very good) rocket company make a person richer than anyone has ever been in the history of the planet, but that's probably because I just haven't looked into it enough.

Well for one thing you're downplaying several massive, global businesses. PayPal is a $25b sales, $4b operating income giant in the financial sector (payments / payment processing specifically). They have an $83b market cap and have sales equivalent to Germany's largest bank. Musk doesn't own a meaningful part of PayPal, it plays no role in his present wealth (other than he sold his ownership stake in PayPal to fund…

> Owning 16% of a segment-leading, tech-leading, growing car company that generates $12-$14b in operating income, is a very good business to be sitting on.

Every rational thinking person sees Musk and his behavior and throws any financial statement produced by Tesla straight into the bin.

They are cooking the books 100%. Musk believes in manifestation, self-fulfilling prophecy and faking it till you make it.

In the early days of PayPal he'd order to get parts of old fridges, paint them black in order to convince investors that PayPal had "supercomputers"

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#423

Post by fny »

adventured wrote: post #417
trothamel wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla is up 995% over the past 5 years.

Quoted post unavailable.

The question is not whether he's been successful. He has been, the question is whether this is the peak valuation akin to Cisco during dotcom and whether he is over leveraged at this point.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#424

Post by selimthegrim »

jayd16 wrote: post #51
dylan604 wrote: post #4

"To the hard working (current and former) Tweeps out there who made all this happen: Thank you for pouring your heart and soul into this place " Tweeps? Is that really a term of endearment they refer to each other as? Really?

Better than Twits, Teets, Twats, and Tweebs I guess. Even birds is pretty bad.

I guess Peeps is already spoken for. Drowning their post-firing sorrows in alcohol wouldn’t be a good idea anyway.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#426

Post by garbagetime »

ilamont wrote: post #262
kyledrake wrote: post #189

I've been using Twitter since it's main novelty was that it was a successful Ruby on Rails app, and honestly I've been trying to figure out where the exit is for my personal use of Twitter lately. If the acquisition goes through, Twitter won't make enough money to service it's debt, and the things they will do to fix that are pretty much guaranteed to lower the quality of the platform, which frankly has never worked…

> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. This is key. If @dang suddenly threw up his hands and said "anything goes on HN within U.S. law" this wonderful virtual discussion forum would die and most of us would sign off forever. I say that as someone whose be…

I've never once thought to myself "I'm happy that the people I follow are only allowed to express some views" or any similar thought. If someone is too rude, I block the person. If I don't enjoy reading a person's Tweets, I unfollow him.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#427

Post by lesstenseflow »

bredren wrote: post #401
lesstenseflow wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would firing someone who's on paternity leave be an issue at all? We're talking multi-millionaires who will get multi-million dollar severance. It's pretty hilarious to see the pearl clutching of techno-bourgeoisie over something like this, pretending other tech-lords are getting mistreated over some supposed breach of decorum. The mere fact that he gets to take parental leave puts him head and shoulders above mo…

That there is high compensation attached to this job is unrelated to the principal of firing an employee on family leave. Companies are having to hold the line on what we value in this country, as legislation from environmental to health is not keeping up. Twitter is specifically of note because the CEO recently had a child and rightfully took paid leave himself. Whatever your personal opinions are on Elon Musk, he i…

From elsewhere in this thread:

- Part of the deal with being an executive is no job security. It's part of the trade you make for gigantic compensation.

- What would be preferred, firing him the first day he's back?

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#428

Post by frankjr »

johnboiles wrote: post #217

This is mind boggling to me. Kayvon is one of the best product leaders / visionaries I know. It was confusing to me in Dec that he wasn't Jack's successor. Kayvon was a huge driving force behind all the interesting product efforts of the last few years: Spaces, Fleets, topics, etc. Twitter went from not iterating on product (remember when Twitter's only change in several years was to change the star to a heart?) to s…

Why do you think Twitter needs any changes? I would personally prefer if they removed all of the remaining features you listed and went back to the good old plain chronological list of tweets that made Twitter popular.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#429

Post by outworlder »

zamfi wrote: post #356
SemanticStrengh wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the revolution? There are competitive cars vs tesla for electric. Even if tesla have an edge, it's evolutionary, not at all revolutionary.

Tesla produced the first ICE-equivalent EV sedan that was not merely a "compliance vehicle" in decades. Then, it turned out, people bought them by the hundreds of thousands, single-handedly recreating the market for EVs. Then, other manufacturers noticed, and started realizing they might be left behind if they didn't take EVs seriously. Now, sure, there are many competitors, but even still they have only been built i…

The real ace was releasing an EV sports car, the Tesla Roadster. That's what caught people's attention. They were able to see how EV drivetrains were actually better than their ICE counterparts and that electric motors can do much more than drive golf carts – despite having powered everything from submarines to locomotives, people still thought they were weak.

Otherwise, Nissan would have been Tesla. They have produced some of the first practical EVs, way before Tesla did. Unfortunately, they made them for the Japanese consumer, not for the average american. At least not initially.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#430

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #394
tempestn wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority is due to the fact that Tesla's valuation skyrocketed in 2020-2021. The second-largest car maker by market cap is Toyota at 217B. (They're about double VW group, the next-largest.) Tesla's market cap is now 740B. For a while there it was over 1T. Here's a fun visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRQlsDHbl0M

VW will produce more EV next year than tesla (800K)

Hopefully they will produce 800k EVs. In 2020, they produced 263k EVs, so they'll roughly need to triple production.

https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/2022/01/Volkswagen_doub...

Tesla produced 936k cars last year, so VW will probably need to build more than 800k EVs to surpass Tesla in 2022.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38657616/tesla-million-ev...

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