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Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

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Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#271

Post by ssnistfajen »

sqlcommando wrote: post #111
BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what we mean by his high-level vision. If it's the "everything app", I'd say that vision is not bad by default, but the details matter. But if his high-level vision is described by his actions so far... oh my God, yeah, no one would wanna touch that with a thousand mile pole.

"Everything app" seems like a great vision. Let's not get hung up on the details of, you know... everything.

It's fun to think about until you realize building the company/service portofolio that can support a mega-app would almost certainly attract ire from regulators even within the U.S., ignoring the amount of capital investment required to achieve it.

Plus, Uber/Spotify/Doordash/Yelp can barely turn a profit as-is. What incentives will the everything app offer to pull consumers away from these existing competitors other than subsidizing the services with VC money, which would only worsen profitability and sustainability?

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#272

Post by BulgarianIdiot »

sqlcommando wrote: post #111
BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what we mean by his high-level vision. If it's the "everything app", I'd say that vision is not bad by default, but the details matter. But if his high-level vision is described by his actions so far... oh my God, yeah, no one would wanna touch that with a thousand mile pole.

"Everything app" seems like a great vision. Let's not get hung up on the details of, you know... everything.

Haha, funny response, but I did say the details matter ;-)

I may be projecting my own ideas onto "everything". When Elon took over Twitter, I was inspired by his idea, and combined with concepts from some projects I'm working on, over two weeks or so, in my free time I wrote like 50+ pages of notes on what "Twitter 2.0" might be.

Is Elon's idea anything close to so comprehensive, I don't know. We only know he wanted payments in it, but this is barely scratching the surface of what Twitter could be.

Twitter's timeline of messages could be seen as a communication platform, computation platform, verified facts registry and so on. The rabbit hole is deep if you let your fantasy run wild.

Alas... instead we have this today.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#273

Post by philippejara »

jasode wrote: post #226

It's instructive to contrast what other billionaires did with media properties they owned: - Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone and let the editors run it. What Jeff did do was invest some money into the IT department to modernize the workflow tools (metrics dashboards, etc) for journalists. He stayed out of the decisions of what stories get run on the front page. - Rupert Murdoch owns…

Like elon or not it makes absolutely no sense to compare social media with effectively newspapers, they're completely different things. The only comparison I guess you could realistically have is zuckerberg, but even then it wouldn't work very well.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#274

Post by sytelus »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #196
323 wrote: post #58

Elon Musk posted "Vox Populi, Vox Dei" on 19 Oct and 19 Nov. Today is 19 Dec, and in 12 hours he'll post again that the people have spoken. He's playing some sort of game. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1582778449583693836 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593769469741932544

Maybe he's got a stimulant (or other psychoactive) prescription that renews around this time of the month and we're witnessing a periodic, chemically induced mania?

This is actually a very good guess. A vast majority of these ultra-rich population are now on simulants and psychoactive drugs.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#275

Post by IAmGraydon »

motohagiography wrote: post #233

If this is originating from Qatar, I would speculate this poll is the result of a bet. The Emir, or another royal family member offers to make Elon whole on his $40B investment if he is willing to put his future in the hands of his users/subjects. If Elon wins, the Emir pays out, maybe for a small equity stake, and if Elon loses, the Emir gets to pick the new CEO of Twitter, and probably buys a significant equity sta…

Or he has already decided to step down (or was forced to by his investors), knows how the poll will turn out, and is creating the illusion that the masses have a say in it.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#276

Post by hristov »

modeless wrote: post #12

I think he only posts polls when he believes he knows the outcome already. Yesterday he posted a poll about unsuspending the journalist accounts and when the outcome wasn't what he wanted instead of following the majority vote he posted it again with different options (with the same result, which he did abide by the second time). I think this indicates he's tired of Twitter already. But he still owns it, so who will…

Of course he knows what the results will be. He owns twitter. He has all the admin passwords to the server that runs the poll. The admins that run the server answer to him. The result of this poll will be whatever Elon Musk wants it to be.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#277

Post by ramesh31 »

motohagiography wrote: post #233

If this is originating from Qatar, I would speculate this poll is the result of a bet. The Emir, or another royal family member offers to make Elon whole on his $40B investment if he is willing to put his future in the hands of his users/subjects. If Elon wins, the Emir pays out, maybe for a small equity stake, and if Elon loses, the Emir gets to pick the new CEO of Twitter, and probably buys a significant equity sta…

Either that or he’s just drunk.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#278

Post by gonzo41 »

Animats wrote: post #201

He really needs to get out of there and back to work at Tesla. Nobody's driving over there, the stock is tanking, and all the other auto manufacturers now have electric car lines. Usually, CEO contracts have a clause that the person will devote substantially all of their work time to the business. Not spending time on side projects.

Listen to this from about minute 35. The price may not go up.

https://openargs.com/oa663-elon-dumps-42-million-more-shares...

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#279

Post by phphphphp »

x0x0 wrote: post #227
phphphphp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter was fine before Elon, there were no existential risks to it. Everything happening to Twitter today is Elon’s doing. Any story otherwise is Elon’s preferred fiction.

That's not true. Twitter was already losing money, whilst ads, their primary income source, is taking a hit due to economic problems. At the same time, the way they did ads is (the same as FB) running against secular trends against data sharing and privacy. Jack and previous management had utterly failed on the product front. Excluding Spaces and Blue (for news junkies, which already got shot), what product changes h…

Twitter was doing fine financially, they were consistently floating around break even and they had lots of opportunities to move into profitability if their financial situation became tenuous. As far as technology companies go, they weren’t anything to write home about, they weren’t printing money the way Google does, but they were doing fine.

Twitter doesn’t need to make constant product changes, as is evidenced by their ability to continue to support hundreds of millions of users and consistently generate billions of dollars of revenue: they’re valuable as-is. The Muskian narrative that Twitter needs better programmers who churn out more features is just not true.

I very much agree that Jack was half-assing management of the company but the consequence was that Twitter was falling far short of its potential, not that Twitter was struggling. If your argument is that the lack of profitability makes Twitter vulnerable to activist investors, then, well, you’re about a decade behind on market sentiment. Nobody cares about profitability any more: if the company can sustain itself, which Twitter could, then stock price is all that matters.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#280

Post by LudwigNagasena »

wmf wrote: post #28
pseudo0 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like it would be the smart move to hire someone with expertise in social media, give them his high-level vision, and let them implement the details. The last few weeks of Elon's micromanagement have been a complete shitshow.

Everyone with expertise in social media hates Elon's high-level vision.

I am sure you wanted to make Elon look like a bad guy, but saying that people from Facebook and Tiktok hate Elon's vision does the exact opposite.
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