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Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

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Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#571

Post by dub »

fleddr wrote: post #547

Random thoughts. 1. I think any effort to figure out rational motives for this buy are in vain. It seems things just pop into his head and if considered a fun challenge, then why not? A child-like YOLO attitude. 2. Town square. The one thing that keeps Twitter standing is its cultural relevance. It is the town square for the elite (politicians, celebrities, experts). There isn't really anywhere else to go. An exodus…

Class A players don't work for controlling managers who overload them with near impossible targets. Class A players have plenty of options in tech, and have no need to tolerate having their skills called into question or disrespected by pointy-haired middle managers.

When Bill Coughran was asked how he was able to successfully manage so many famously high performers (engineers like Jeff Dean), Bill explained how that caliber of engineer tends to have strong opinions and you basically have to build a whole team around them and give them the freedom to do their thing.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#572

Post by IgorPartola »

fleddr wrote: post #547

Random thoughts. 1. I think any effort to figure out rational motives for this buy are in vain. It seems things just pop into his head and if considered a fun challenge, then why not? A child-like YOLO attitude. 2. Town square. The one thing that keeps Twitter standing is its cultural relevance. It is the town square for the elite (politicians, celebrities, experts). There isn't really anywhere else to go. An exodus…

To your point number 2: perhaps part of the reason why Twitter is the town square is because it is not super profitable. If it was as chock full of ads as Facebook I think it would cease to be usable.

In reality if we want a public square, we ideally want it to be a public utility not a for profit corporation.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#573

Post by randomsearch »

mullingitover wrote: post #320
julianeon wrote: post #57

In the spirit of trying to be high-information and add value: Where Musk is going, there are no maps. So it's very very hard to project. But we can predict likely developments. At a very high level, it's going to involve: bringing back controversial personalities like Donald Trump; increasing Twitter's commitment to 'free speech'; assuaging skittish advertisers; retaining users who might be concerned, while bringing…

> managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless; This is probably the biggest risk in this acquisition. Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model. Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.

If you think Twitter can be easily cloned then you know everything about tech and nothing about business.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#574

Post by freejazz »

concinds wrote: post #307
julianeon wrote: post #57

In the spirit of trying to be high-information and add value: Where Musk is going, there are no maps. So it's very very hard to project. But we can predict likely developments. At a very high level, it's going to involve: bringing back controversial personalities like Donald Trump; increasing Twitter's commitment to 'free speech'; assuaging skittish advertisers; retaining users who might be concerned, while bringing…

Most people are focused on censorship/content issues, but I really think the X.com "mega app" vision is the most significant part of this. It'll be hard to gain a foothold in those markets, and there'll be antitrust challenges, but it really fits perfectly with the rest of Musk's vision: X.com Maps could tie in with Teslas, X.com Carhailing could tie-in with (future) full self-driving; Twitter could be expanded to be…

Are you serious? Why would I ever use that app? I already don't use twitter and there are market leaders that would have much better service (given they aren't trying to do every single thing in the world) compared to X and also, most of those services pretty much stink, so I would never think that X, while trying to do everything in the world, would also be better.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#575

Post by esoterica »

fleddr wrote: post #547

Random thoughts. 1. I think any effort to figure out rational motives for this buy are in vain. It seems things just pop into his head and if considered a fun challenge, then why not? A child-like YOLO attitude. 2. Town square. The one thing that keeps Twitter standing is its cultural relevance. It is the town square for the elite (politicians, celebrities, experts). There isn't really anywhere else to go. An exodus…

> 3. Brain drain. I expect the exact opposite. This is the part where Musk thrives and also where he's at his cruelest. He will remove slackers and non-performers without mercy and surround himself with class A players only. Next he'll overload them with near impossible targets and you can't bullshit yourself out of it. You deliver or you're out. I would expect him to run this for a year or so and accomplish more than Twitter's dysfunctional product team did in their entire history.

Is Musk planning on paying Twitter employees substantially more than other tech companies? Why would any class A player want the privilege of being "overloaded" with work when they can make similar or better money elsewhere and also have better work-life balance? Why do all the Elon worshippers seem to assume that everyone is as enamored him as they are and will happily volunteer to be exploited by him so the world's richest man can get even richer?

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#576

Post by morelisp »

DreadY2K wrote: post #425
_chap wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Boring Company's latest test tunnel was about 1034 times slower than a snail (their current stated goal). https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/xugxdl/comme...

How does this compare to other companies that dig tunnels?

Per Musk's original introduction of the snail, it's 14x faster than existing boring machines. So TBC did extremely poorly.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#577

Post by three_seagrass »

fleddr wrote: post #547

Random thoughts. 1. I think any effort to figure out rational motives for this buy are in vain. It seems things just pop into his head and if considered a fun challenge, then why not? A child-like YOLO attitude. 2. Town square. The one thing that keeps Twitter standing is its cultural relevance. It is the town square for the elite (politicians, celebrities, experts). There isn't really anywhere else to go. An exodus…

>Town square. The one thing that keeps Twitter standing is its cultural relevance.

Social networks rise and fall. Twitter is no more the town square than MySpace, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Mastadon, Snap, LinkedIn, etc. are, and the attempts to redefine them as such are only a means to political end.

Musk cares more about making money than anything else - he didn't become a billionaire by being altruistic and he's not going to start now after this investment.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#578

Post by skilled »

IgorPartola wrote: post #572
fleddr wrote: post #547

Random thoughts. 1. I think any effort to figure out rational motives for this buy are in vain. It seems things just pop into his head and if considered a fun challenge, then why not? A child-like YOLO attitude. 2. Town square. The one thing that keeps Twitter standing is its cultural relevance. It is the town square for the elite (politicians, celebrities, experts). There isn't really anywhere else to go. An exodus…

To your point number 2: perhaps part of the reason why Twitter is the town square is because it is not super profitable. If it was as chock full of ads as Facebook I think it would cease to be usable. In reality if we want a public square, we ideally want it to be a public utility not a for profit corporation.

The irony being that the public square at large is a disease of the people and not the consequence of a specific platform.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#579

Post by freejazz »

qwertox wrote: post #512
julianeon wrote: post #57

In the spirit of trying to be high-information and add value: Where Musk is going, there are no maps. So it's very very hard to project. But we can predict likely developments. At a very high level, it's going to involve: bringing back controversial personalities like Donald Trump; increasing Twitter's commitment to 'free speech'; assuaging skittish advertisers; retaining users who might be concerned, while bringing…

Let's assume he makes Neuralink happen in the sense of really giving a locked-in person the ability to communicate in real words and sentences. He now has the network to connect those people directly to the rest of the world, under his umbrella. Sure, he could have just used (old) Twitter's API, and that's what he'll be using, but it won't be "we (as in 'Neuralink') and Twitter made this happen", but "we (my companie…

No post body was provided.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#580

Post by three_seagrass »

cutenewt wrote: post #289
thinkingemote wrote: post #248

They need to re-free up the API. Early adopters and hackers really did some great work using the API until they walled-gardened it and rate limited it to make it unusable. They need to do this for goodwill at the very least, but I think it will spark the fire to make it popular with techies again. Based on the recently published discovery chats we will probably see: * High def video * Focus on music publication * The…

I think it's going to be more in the other direction. He really hates the bots, so he'll probably close up the API. Until bots gets solved, no developer should expect the API to open up.

Elon only mentioned the bot 'problem' to get out of the deal.

He shut up about the bots as soon as it was evident the excuse wasn't working. Bots are of no concern otherwise.

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