It has been a mere days since the acquisition closed. The results of what Musk is doing today will play out over months, maybe years. Yes it may all crash and burn at some point, but if you are already declaring it a failure with zero backing data then it is simply your bias talking.
Thoughts about Twitter
131–140 of 235 posts
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, so he signed the contract. Decided not to buy it because it was a massively overvalued money pit but they forced him anyway. So now he is supposed to keep dumping money into the burning dumpster fire that is twitter?
They didn't force him. He could have backed out by paying the contract breaking fee. Once you sign you have to stick to it one way or the other. He could have written in a due diligence clause, but did not.
Not to defend Elon Musk since I generally agree that this whole thing is a dumpster fire of his own making but he couldn't have backed out by paying the contract breaking fee. Twitter was suing him for specific performance, meaning they were asking the courts to force him to close the deal. And everything I read during the saga seemed to be in agreement that Musk had ~0% chance of getting out of the deal.
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Advertising is a human problem. I think Elon is already feeling the blowback from immediately misunderstanding it based on this tweet[1]. It's going to be interesting to see how he intends on making up that $5b/year. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880
I'd be careful about that tweet. It is clear that Tesla competitors (GM, VW) stop funding Musk, but aside from that most big advertisers likely have longer running contracts, so immediate impact is unlikely. By such a statement Musk can however argue that the RIFs are "required"
Do companies have "contracts" for ads on the internet these days? I thought most ads on social media, Twitter included, were self service with an automated bidding system that allowed each advertiser to tweak how much they're willing to pay per ad view in real-time. You can essentially just login to your account and hit the big "OFF" button whenever you want.
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need a few people to maintain the servers, not a few thousand people.
Yes, but if you happen to fire "the wrong" people it can take a while till the remaining one understand that component well enough for a hot fix, which for the original team had been easy and if ops are wieder to the specific dev team one can assume there are a few components with little attention now in the mix.
So then you have to keep 6k engineers on payroll?)
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#135It has been a mere days since the acquisition closed. The results of what Musk is doing today will play out over months, maybe years. Yes it may all crash and burn at some point, but if you are already declaring it a failure with zero backing data then it is simply your bias talking.
mere days after takeover and already laying off engineers, getting class action employment lawsuit in CA, and advertisers are leaving in droves.
very productive start
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#136> The illusion of Elon Musk, David Sacks and Jason Calcanis as savvy operators is completely gone. Elon has owned Twiter for less than a week. How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure? How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?
> How is it that everyone is already declaring it a failure?
The article does touch on this a bit. Elon went in "with a red pen": his entire first week from an outside perspective was spent looking for costs to cut, departments to toss, and things to shutdown. It culminated in a 50% (!) layoff in the first week. That's not usually the sign of a healthy start, especially if you assume that the previous owners weren't that crazy and had somewhere upwards of 100% redundancy where you can just fire 50% of the company without consequences.
> How can you argue the richest man on the planet is bad at running businesses?
1) The Peter Principle: incompetency has a way of failing upward in businesses.
2) The "Gravity" Constant of Money: once you've made enough net worth it attracts more automatically. Billionaires are basically "black holes" of passive income no matter what they think their day job is.
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#137OP makes it sound as if Twitter were a good platform for public discourse - it’s not. It’s a cesspool of indignation, racism, faux wokeness (white-knighting to feel superior over others) etc. If you don’t have a thick skin like Musk, you must self-censor yourself pretty heavily to avoid backlash and sometimes humiliation. Just liking a controversial tweet or following a problematic account can get you on the bad side…
> It’s a cesspool of indignation, racism, faux wokeness > I‘m not even sure I‘d consider Twitter worth saving. Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using. Either way, the point isn't how bad Twitter is in your personal opinion, the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse.
I was referring to the favorable state of Twitter OP was describing, which doesn’t hold up IMO.
> Obviously the people who use it think it's worth using
I‘m an ex heavy Twitter user. I primarily use it for keeping up to date with tech, but the signal/noise ratio is not great nowadays. I can see myself switching to Reddit and HN completely.
> the point the author rightly makes is that it will get worse
That remains to be seen, no? What’s the use of writing that a week after an acquisition?
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if you don't think you need that much operations labor at scale (and I'm assuming you are drastically under-estimating Twitter's current scale), when you do a 50% layoff before you even know your exact bus factor and are assuming a 100x/1000x redundancy (somehow), what are the odds you lay off one of those "few" people that are critical to operations? How do you know you haven't thrown out the needles in that bi…
Software engineers: we’re engineers Also software engineers: be sure not to fire Ned or else the whole bridge might collapse
At the scale of a company like Twitter, the product and infrastructure are less like a static bridge and more like a complex living, evolving organism. So the analogy is not a very good one.
So your patient might be ok if you fire Ned, but if you try to make changes and a critical system goes down, it might take you a lot longer to fix things without the specialists in that system.
You could keep one specialist around for each system, but then you have a very small bus factor.
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#139I believe Elon will learn the hard way that yes you can solve tech problems by throwing humans at them but you can't solve human problems by throwing tech at them.
Creating the giga factories and making space x a success were as much a technical success as a human success. At this scale in the game, everything is. We can be critical of his actions, but at this point, assuming incompetence is foolish.
No it's not. Musk "created" a factory as much as Columbus "Discovered" the Americas. That's about it.
Re: Thoughts about Twitter
#140What I get from this whole experience is big tech employees, likely on a wage x^2 their national average, are able to communicate more widely to the world about their disenfranchisement about being unemployed than others made unemployed who are not. Slightly ironic that they're employed by social networks. Said tongue in cheek because these are people with livelihoods and looking after families. There are others that…
Are you aware of how exponents work?
OP is correct if the strongest rebuttal to the argument being put forward is semantic pedantry.
You can spot stupid[*] replies miles away when there's no attempt to engage with the substance of the argument.
[*]: Yes, stupid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc