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Thoughts about Twitter

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Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#221

Post by beeboop »

reducesuffering wrote: post #204
93po wrote: post #69

> 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?

The guy did just buy a $15b business for $45b, instantly losing $30b...

The measure of success isn't how much Twitter fell before he had anything to do with it. It's where it ends up after he's had more than a couple days to improve it.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#222

Post by beeboop »

WorldMaker wrote: post #136
93po wrote: post #69

> 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…

Cutting costs in a company that's almost never been profitable is failure? A huge layout isn't a suggestion of an unhealthy start, it's a suggestion of an unhealthy status quo.

What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions?

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#223

Post by reducesuffering »

beeboop wrote: post #221
reducesuffering wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy did just buy a $15b business for $45b, instantly losing $30b...

The measure of success isn't how much Twitter fell before he had anything to do with it. It's where it ends up after he's had more than a couple days to improve it.

By any measure, Twitter is currently far worse off than a week ago. Yes, a measure of success is purchasing something for 3x the price, losing $30b because someone was foolish enough to initiate that purchase. You should question the competence of someone doing that.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#224

Post by tomhoward »

meheleventyone wrote: post #175
longrod wrote: post #155

I think this is nothing except shitposting. The whole blog reads like an angry rant of someone who didn't get what he wanted. This is not new. Layoffs are not a new thing. New management, new rules, it's always been like this. Do I feel sorry for the people who got layed off? Of course I do! I wouldn't want to be them right now. I feel for them. But the consequences mentioned in this post is completely unreasonable.…

> Musk is not an idiot. He must know exactly what he needs to do. How does this square with the attempts to get out of the deal? I think your points would make a lot more sense if he hadn’t signalled extremely clearly that he thought the deal was terrible.

There’s no evidence he wanted to walk away altogether - he just wanted to get the fairest price, and surely his investors/financiers would have been demanding he negotiate the best price he legally could.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#225

Post by infamouscow »

d23 wrote: post #168
infamouscow wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The entire argument rests on a calculation that a third grader can see is absurd.

Restated:

What I get from this whole experience is big tech employees, likely on a wage double 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.

Now that I've done the hard work of fixing the typo that apparently invalidates the argument, it ought to be trivial to provide a counter-argument.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#226

Post by dekhn »

tomlue wrote: post #11

I don't work at a giant company, but I'm curious: > Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop. Is this true? Shouldn't giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?

They do obsess about reducing human intervention, but in every system I've ever seen, you still need humans for the "out of context" problems https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutsideContextPr...

For example, one day SRE got alerted that a bunch of expensive accelerators were unexpectedly shutting down and not restarting production. SRE has to reach out in this case to the SWEs who build/designed the system to ask some clarifying questions. Together, the SREs and SWEs form a series of hypotheses about the cause, ultimately discovering an entirely unanticipated failure mode.

I think I'm one of the few people in the world who has attached a $100K oscilloscope to the voltage regulator on a machine learning accelerator to debug why a specific training job that did a series of convolutions at a highly specific rate would cause a DC-DC regulator to act like an AC source. It took far, far longer to write and deploy the rule that detected this problem in prod than it took us to identify the problem and stop the killer job.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#227

Post by theCrowing »

skizm wrote: post #133
johannes1234321 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The contracts are not with the specific platform rather with a media agency these agencies on the other hand have contracts with platforms.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#228

Post by WorldMaker »

beeboop wrote: post #222
WorldMaker wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Cutting costs in a company that's almost never been profitable is failure? A huge layout isn't a suggestion of an unhealthy start, it's a suggestion of an unhealthy status quo. What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions?

> Cutting costs in a company that's almost never been profitable is failure? A huge layout isn't a suggestion of an unhealthy start, it's a suggestion of an unhealthy status quo.

Maybe? It's not just that's an early layoff. It's that it is an early layoff of a huge magnitude. Again, a 50% layoff means that the previous status quo had upwards of 100% redundancy. That is unbelievable for any company, no matter how unprofitable. (I could believe it of a very profitable company with money to "waste", but a publicly traded company getting asked every quarter why they aren't profitable yet? I can't believe it. If it were that simple to cut overhead, shareholders would have demanded it years ago.) Feel free to give Musk the benefit of the doubt and assume Twitter really was that unhealthy. I feel there's a lot more reason to be skeptical here.

> What material business failings has Elon had so far that you would include in him failing upwards? Is Tesla and SpaceX successful despite Elon's bad decisions, and if so, what were those bad decisions?

I may be a bit hyperbolic claiming that the Peter Principle must especially apply to billionaires.

But, it is entirely possible to believe that Musk succeeded entirely on luck and his decisions didn't matter (for good or bad) in the long run. EVs were a huge gamble 15 years ago, but it also didn't take that much of a crystal ball to know that they were "the future". Space is always a giant gamble and the most successful always seem to just be the luckiest. (That was one of Heinlein's hypotheses early in the space race. I think a lot of sci-fi writers still believe it to be true today. Admittedly sci-fi writers don't have the most hard data to prove/disprove such a hypothesis, but it is still a useful hypothesis.)

None of that requires "proving" that the companies were successful "despite" Musk. I think there is evidence of some questionable business model practices, too (and there's plenty on Musk's business decisions out there to find; it's not "new" criticism), and I have provided some of it in at least one other thread, but at the end of the day: when you are judging someone based on the number of poker chips they have on the table, it's fair to question if it was all just random luck, especially when that someone is also acting a bit as the Dealer and getting a chunk of House money too.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#229

Post by watwut »

xiphias2 wrote: post #201
watwut wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk is not center left. The most radical and literally proviolence people pressuring you don't make you center left

I'm not sure where you are getting this from. He was literally pushing for peace talks in the Ukrain-Russia war, where lots of people are dying right now. Also he has manufacturing plants all over the world (China), so he would lose the most from violence (while many other billionaires are profiting from war).

The "radical and literally proviolence people pressuring you" refered to Alex Jones and Trump pressuring. Them pressuring Musk does not make Musk center left.

> He was literally pushing for peace talks in the Ukrain-Russia war, where lots of people are dying right now.

That does not make Musk left nor anti violence. It rewards violence. It makes him either naive or pro Russia.

It allows Russia to torture and continue genocide in territories it has. It rewards it for invasion and creates situation in which Russia will logically invade again.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#230

Post by meheleventyone »

tomhoward wrote: post #224
meheleventyone wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk is not an idiot. He must know exactly what he needs to do. How does this square with the attempts to get out of the deal? I think your points would make a lot more sense if he hadn’t signalled extremely clearly that he thought the deal was terrible.

There’s no evidence he wanted to walk away altogether - he just wanted to get the fairest price, and surely his investors/financiers would have been demanding he negotiate the best price he legally could.

I’m honestly flummoxed that you think there is no evidence and that you think this was his plan all along. We’ve all been very aware of what’s been happening since he made the deal in the first place. The ability to negotiate stopped then.

You don’t need to make excuses for him or pretend he is infallible!

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