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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

#511

Post by neycoda »

dragonwriter wrote: post #503
FormerBandmate wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of the absurdly conservative WSJ opinion pages, I wouldn't even say that. The Wall Street Journal is the paper of Wall Street, it has a slight inherent pro-business bias but besides that it reports the news fairly and accurately. The rest of Murdoch's business empire is nothing like it, compare WSJ.com to FoxNews.com at any given point and you'll see a drastic difference.

> Outside of the absurdly conservative WSJ opinion pages, I wouldn’t even say that. The Wall Street Journal is the paper of Wall Street, it has a slight inherent pro-business bias but besides that it reports the news fairly and accurately. The WSJ had a right-wing political bias (beyond just a vague pro-business bias) under Dow Jones (in the news, not just the–even then–absurdly right-wing opinion pages), and it got…

News reporting is one thing, opinion reporting is its own beast, and I think a lot of people are not considering the difference much if at all. Murdoch and Bezos and others like that can craft a narrative through opinion reporting decisions without touching the news. The discussion seems to mix the two when the opinion pieces craft thought far more than news story selection.

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

#512

Post by neycoda »

kyrra wrote: post #339
jasode wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, but his entire media empire is built around promulgating his (increasingly revanchist) politics. Yes, I understand that and we know that WSJ leans more conservative than New York Times. Murdoch's empire reflects his worldview. I mean "stay out of it" as in micro-managing day-to-day newspaper stories or writing constant op-eds to respond to his critics. That's the type of distracting minutiae that Elon has sucked h…

The editorial pages of WSJ are definitely conservative. The news side tends to lean center left. As a conservative and subscriber to Wall Street journal for the past 6 years, the news side regularly butts heads with editorial side.

Exactly. The opinion pages are what craft thought far more than news. Those can be where the owners have impact without touching news.

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

#513

Post by jacquesm »

Davesjoshin wrote: post #509
krapp wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He isn't a badass engineer. He hires badass engineers and gets the credit for their work.

ehh yea, maybe he just sees this as an opportunity to do the same thing. Hire people at some point to fix all this.. seems like a tall order

It's rapidly going beyond fixable. Even now I am pretty sure that all you would end up doing is slowing down the inevitable crash. Engines 1, 2, and 3 are on fire and four just started smoking. The captain is paging the passengers to see if any of them wants to fly the plane and has passed out satisfaction surveys about his performance so far.

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

#514

Post by acdha »

kyrra wrote: post #339
jasode wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, but his entire media empire is built around promulgating his (increasingly revanchist) politics. Yes, I understand that and we know that WSJ leans more conservative than New York Times. Murdoch's empire reflects his worldview. I mean "stay out of it" as in micro-managing day-to-day newspaper stories or writing constant op-eds to respond to his critics. That's the type of distracting minutiae that Elon has sucked h…

The editorial pages of WSJ are definitely conservative. The news side tends to lean center left. As a conservative and subscriber to Wall Street journal for the past 6 years, the news side regularly butts heads with editorial side.

How are you defining “center left”? The only way I could see that working is if you’re defining that as acknowledging climate change is real or something similar.

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

#515

Post by AlotOfReading »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #355
nkozyra wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He is a genius I realize this is part of his narrative but I struggle to find the genius. As best i can tell he's a generally successful businessman.

It's hyperbole. Tesla and SpaceX were insane accomplishments in moribund industries (the first successful auto startup in 80 years, and pretty much singlehanfedly revitalizing space travel which was basically dead, people with way more resources tried and failed at both of them). That being said, the Twitter acquisition is the work of a petulant child

Do Kia (reborn in 1986), Tata, and Saleen not count as successful? Tesla has had an impressive rise, but it's not like nothing happened between 1923 and 2003 in the automotive industry.

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

#516

Post by LarryMullins »

c22 wrote: post #327
bmitc wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What tech people like Paul Graham and others were hoping was for Elon to apply his scientific first principles type of thinking that he demonstrated previously at SpaceX+Tesla to Twitter. I wish one could take a step back and just see how ridiculous of a statement this is. There is nothing about Musk’s history and management style that is even remotely close to what could be called “scientific first principles type…

My pet theory is that the cybertuck is just an excuse to start prototyping a future martian ground transport, in which case atmospheric drag may be less of a concern.

My pet theory is that Elon Musk's talk about colonizing Mars is a recruiting ploy, allowing him to hire top tier rocket scientists relatively cheap because they believe in the mission.

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

#518

Post by Faark »

dotnet00 wrote: post #446
sdenton4 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that people who want to do social media will become what they hate, because of the very real constraints which people learn about quickly once they're actually steering the ship. Very few social media places don't suck, and it takes a pretty heavy hand to keep things from going completely to hell. The two places I know which aren't hives of scum and villainy are HN and Metafilter; both are heavily mode…

I feel like to an extent that is the usual response to any sort of attempt at disruption. For example, prior to Falcon 9 the argument used to be that SpaceX too would have to either succumb to relying on expensive cost-plus contracts or go bust like all other space companies before them. Yet, as they pushed up against that attitude and tried their own approach, they became successful and set the model that has now le…

It certainly would be a fun experiment. But the dynamics are so quite different from what he usually deals with.

Lets start with employees... both Tesla and especially SpaceX had hordes of people wanting to work there. I don't currently see the same for Twitter, and Elon just removed a bunch of talent.

Customers are also widely different. Tesla were enthusiasts willing to overlook drawbacks and oopsies. SpaceX was few high value ones like NASA, and by now have a great track record, not to mention the price. Instead of believers in the company mission, many twitter users are just average people. They will complain. They might leave due to drastic changes. Sure, there is a strong network effect. But Musk payed a lot of money for that, should he really risk it all?

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

#519

Post by acdha »

x0x0 wrote: post #417
phphphphp wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think Twitter were fine: they were consistently losing money (to your point, not a ton, but still, losing money even in a great economy), with large layoffs to come, esp once you factor in a 20% or so fall in ad income. With more income cuts, and hence layoffs, on the way as privacy laws worldwide make Twitter worse as an ad platform. So I would argue that Twitter desperately needs to either get much better a…

Twitter was profitable in a couple of recent years and would have been last year to the tune of several hundred million except for a one-find lawsuit payment. That’s not ideal, but all they needed to do to improve things was reduce their stock based compensation levels to be in line with their class of company rather than [old] Google/Facebook-level.

That changed dramatically when Musk added over a billion dollars in annual debt payment load, and proceeded to torpedo their ad business. That changed it from “our boat leaks” to “the hull is gone”, and dramatically reduced the options for dealing with it.

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

#520

Post by danaris »

woodruffw wrote: post #328
twblalock wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servers are not that expensive, especially not when people are going to Twitter because they are outraged and seeing all the ads, and others are paying $8 per month. Whether or not that works out is not something I can predict, but having more user engagement than ever before is not a bad thing for a platform that makes literally every penny from exploiting user engagement in some way.

Expensive enough to try and shirk the bills, it seems[1]. I would say that 95% of my professional circle was on Twitter 3 months ago. Today, it feels like less than 50%. Of that same circle, I only know one who paid $8 for Twitter Blue, and he canceled this month. Outrage-driven engagement is definitely happening. But it needs to happen on Twitter, and in a way that doesn't threaten Twitter's ad sales, for it to be o…

That article seems to suggest that Musk has considered cutting just about everything except servers (including paying the lease on the buildings).

But nowhere does it mention cutting servers.

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