I think the only big take away is Musk said too much stuff and is now left holding a culturally relevant, but monetarily flailing company. My expectation is he will do whatever it takes to be successful; cut staff, add more ads and paid features, etc. I believe he will also do certain things under the verneer of "free speech", but will eventually do a 180 because it will hurt the bottom line of the company.
Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
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Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#622I understand that he has been publicly combative with all the executives; but is it a practical to fire all those key executives right away? Specially, do they not contain any specifically useful knowledge or experience that you should make an attempt at creating a collaborative transition? Is this how these kinds of acquisitions of public companies happen? Isn’t this effectively freezing all significant activities f…
I wouldn't have done it that quickly.
Parag Agrawal just made $42 million as a severance package. His 2021 pay package was around $30 million. You'd save around $10 million by shifting him over into an advisor role, telling him to go home and lounge by the pool, and calling him any time you needed whatever insight he might be able to offer. I don't expect you'd call him very often, since I don't think he did an insanely great job as CEO, but maybe he's got the password to the office safe or something.
I'm too lazy to look up the details for the other execs who were fired, but the same kind of math likely applies.
I assume that they're no less limited in what they can say publicly than they would be if they were still employed as officers of the company. Severance agreements often come with NDAs. So that's probably a wash.
It is possible that there's some value in sending the message that nobody is safe. My personal opinion is that managing from fear like that isn't long-term valuable, and I think moving them into clear advisory roles sends the same message, but I could be wrong there.
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#623My predictions: 1. Musk is going to discover (and maybe admit?) that fixing Twitter is harder than he thought. It will be just like self-driving, which seems straightforward, but which actually has thousands of edge cases which are hard to solve with a single general system. Nevertheless, he will persist, because that's what he does. 2. Current Twitter makes a profit on advertising, which means Twitter needs to encou…
4) don't overestimate cut of transaction and underestimate ad revenue (promoting the transaction seekers). Let's use Amazon as an example: They run a 3P marketplace with a transaction cut business model, and it's not very profitable. Vs. their ads based sponsored product which is extremely profitable (soon to larger than AWS for profit at Amazon). This is a very different ad business than twitter's current performance marketing ad product.
I think first party ads promoting commerce on your platform can be very lucrative. And % of transactions tend not to be, with the exception of Android / iOS app store markets.
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#624> Musk hasn’t said all that much since the takeover on Twitter, but he has replied to a couple of users who have complained about platform censorship in the past. One is a user called “catturd2” who claims he’s shadowbanned and who tweets COVID misinformation among other things. The other is Canada Proud, a right-wing propagandist group that also spreads COVID misinfo and focuses on attacking Canadian PM Justin Trude…
I don't think it's a secret that Musk has been cosying up to the Trump right for a while now.
It's only a nasty comment if you find those individuals deplorable, and Musk clearly doesn't.
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#625Random 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 answer call to rid the world of fossil fuel and explore deep space. There's nothing meaningful or productive about Twitter.
More obviously part of his work as CEO and owner will be to develop a meaning and provide Direction.
Maybe he can get people to drink the Kool-Aid that Twitter is and well will be the future of productive Democratic conversation. If I actually believe that, I would want to work there
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#626I always wonder: how much honesty is in him? For example, he stopped talking about the bot population on the platform altogether after he could not get out of the deal. Was he honest about this being a big issue in the first place? For me, it’s not easy to believe this because this bot issue appeared right after Twitter staff did not like his speech, and talks with the CEO fell apart. Am I mistaken about how it all p…
Every one of us has run into situations where choosing to be honest has materially cost us. You accidentally scratch a parked car on your way out. Do you stop and leave a note with contact info or not? The richer you are, the more leverage you have and larger the material cost for these situations. A fellow rich friend gives you a little insider info that a stock you hold is about to crater. Do you sell some? In othe…
If anything I'd say it's the opposite. A random person can get away with cons and scams for a long time. Whenever they get caught, they can just set up shop somewhere else. They can change their name (or simply lie to others about their name). Famous people can't do that. If you're famous, you can commit one scam before your reputation is ruined. Even if the story manages to avoid the news, people talk and word spreads. The incentives are such that a purely selfish billionaire sociopath is better off being honest.
Also, being extremely rich makes you a target for ambitious or activist prosecutors. Everything everywhere is securities fraud.[1][2] Whether you're hung out to dry or not is determined by how much your behavior has annoyed people in certain departments of the US government, or how much you've annoyed their friends.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
2. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-22/everyt...
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#627The reason why Musk eventually bought Twitter, when he did, and at the price he paid, was to avoid having to testify under oath in the lawsuit against him. He was going to be deposed, exposed, and in the end he was also going to lose and suffer the indignity of having to pay a high price for something he fiercely said he didn't want anymore. Better bite the bullet earlier than later. Now that doesn't explain why he w…
What I don't understand is the lawsuit from Twitter. There's an high risk that this is going to damage the company in the long run, so why did the company decided to force him to finish the deal? Sounds a bit kinda suicidal
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#628- That is not a kitchen sink - Twitter is a telegraph office. Journalists love twitter because it makes their job easier by stealing stories/news from each other. For the world outside media twitter is pretty much meh. - Musk unbanning someone doesnt mean much. trump might have sent out tweets with carrier pigeons and the mass media would still pick it up because it sells. twitter bans have very little effect, from t…
100% agree that Twitter is only really important because it's where all the people with voices on other platforms (Youtube, journalists, traditional celebrities, politicians, etc.) spend their time. This gives the platform cultural relevance because these talking heads endlessly feedback on each other, but there aren't enough talking heads or enough of their followers to scale to the size of Facebook.
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#629They 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…
> High def video
Twitter's video serving is embarrassingly woefully bad. Like really, really bad. So much so that Twitter videos buffering is a meme. This should be a core focus.
> They need to re-free up the API
Nobody cares about that. I mean a few developers do but 99.9% of users don't. Nor do they care about the consequences. Time and time again we've seen a growing platform embrace developers until they're large enough not to want to deal with it anymore. This is Lucy and the football at this point. When will we learn?
> They need to do this for goodwill at the very least.
Again, nobody cares about this issue, just like nobody cares about "free speech". They care about not being silenced for their particular positions. Elon's Twitter will reflect this and Elon is very much a conservative (in the US sense).
It's why you only ever hear about "free speech" when it comes to hate speech and never, say, to Palestinians getting silenced on Twitter [1].
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/13/social-media-co...
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#630I said that Musk would never own Twitter, and that it seemed like a drunken bar bet to me. His later actions seemed to signal that he was trying to weasel out of the deal. I concede that I was wrong. However, it still seems like and act of hubris gone wrong to me. The terms of the financing of the acquisition look nasty.
This is probably his Brexit moment...