I’m not surprised the comments here are universally skeptical so far, but I’ll chime in that I think it’s plausible. The largest expense by far was compensation and with 10% the previous workforce it dropped dramatically. The question is how much revenue would have fallen. In the HN bubble X is basically over and everyone has moved to Mastodon, but there has been little change in the folks I follow. Are journalists a…
Elon Musk probably rubbed a lot of people the wrong way with his antics but I don't think he was fundamentally that wrong with his core analysis of the issues facing Twitter when he bought it:
- High staffing cost relative and some revenue challenges.
- Content moderation that was simultaneously controversial, expensive, and biased. And also not that effective.
- The Twitter API was getting abused a lot by people with all sorts of agendas. Including some state actors like Russia.
- R&D stagnation. The site barely changed in the years before he bought it.
So, he took a wrecking ball to the whole thing and upset a lot of people doing so. But, if he gets it back to being profitable next year, that will be a big milestone for them.
I've been using it less and less over the years. But that already started before the takeover. I kind of like Mastodon currently but part of the attraction is that it is relatively free from the noisy crowd that makes Twitter less interesting than it used to be.