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Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

nytimes.com

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Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#811

Post by rob74 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #501
zero_shift wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot see how it was a success. 1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error. 2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche. 3. The firings did not go well. X has struggl…

Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk. I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.

Ok, everything can be seen as a success if you set your expectations low enough...

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#812

Post by spacechild1 »

narism wrote: post #601
martinpw wrote: post #497

The Economist always comes up with good tag lines for stories. In this case: Linda Yaccarino goes from X CEO to ex-CEO. https://www.economist.com/business/2025/07/09/linda-yaccarin...

The cover art is good too. Some favorites: https://www.economist.com/img/b/400/527/90/sites/default/fil... https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8...

The second one is hilarious!

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#813

Post by brookst »

zero_shift wrote: post #459
mrweasel wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there. The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember tha…

I cannot see how it was a success. 1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error. 2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche. 3. The firings did not go well. X has struggl…

There an argument that he paid $44B to get a Us administration that would hugely advantage him and his companies. Certainly he’s made billions from contracts initiated by this administration and seen many regulatory difficulties removed.

Of course it may all fall apart because everyone involved has the temperament of a five year old on a meth bender, but the basic “buy media to influence politics to multiply wealth” approach seems to have worked well.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#814

Post by rurban »

randomtoast wrote: post #771

I think that no matter how bad the news about Elon and his companies might be, his net worth keeps skyrocketing and is currently around the $400B mark. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years Forbes reports that he's the first to reach one trillion.

With his skylink satellite business alone, the win exceeds the whole NASA budget.

With grok now being openly fascist not many execs want to be publicly associated with that. That's a space for leaders only. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44519642

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#815

Post by stirfish »

jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #792
makeitdouble wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "why do they need so many people" were probably in favor of Musk ? On the other side people were already asking why Twitter didn't do more moderation and better filtering (= more people). And we expected that breaking rules would have serious repercussions, which was a foolish assumption as we've seen.

> The "why do they need so many people" were probably in favor of Musk ? I can speak for myself. I think Enron Musk is a despicable person, and at the same time I don't understand why a shitty app needs so many people.

It's an easy (but often wrong) transition from "I don't understand why" to "it must not be necessary".

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#817

Post by bitlax »

michaelmrose wrote: post #725
makeitdouble wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk. I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.

Virtually nobody said that it would go under in a year because that makes no sense. It's financially possible for it to tread water for years whilst losing money. I don't see how this could be deemed a success when a magic 8 ball or a hamster attached to a giant pile of money could keep it going as long.

Lol the overwhelming tech jerk opinion was that he was firing elite engineers and the site would be unmaintainable as a result, and that he had over-leveraged himself to the point of bankruptcy.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#818

Post by mortehu »

cryptoegorophy wrote: post #658
zero_shift wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot see how it was a success. 1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error. 2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche. 3. The firings did not go well. X has struggl…

3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people. One thing I learned from this is to not trust so called “experts” or loud voices.

Twitter has a permanent outage reporting breaking news. Whenever something big happens now, the feed looks like any other day. This didn't use to be the case.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#819

Post by varjag »

phanimahesh wrote: post #795
varjag wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much.

Senior ICs tend to commit relatively unfrequently compared to junior ICs who keep pumping tickets.

Not in my experience, as long as we are talking about ICs.

Re: Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

#820

Post by varjag »

motorest wrote: post #793
varjag wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much.

> From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much. This take is, quite bluntly, stupid and clueless. Do you think each commit reflects the volume of institutional knowledge of any individual? Unbelievable.

Twitter had thousands of coders, each certainly with varying cadence and style of committing. But variation goes only so much and taken in aggregate yes, the amount of commits/diff size is correlated to contributor prominence. It's kinda hilarious the "my -2000 lines" types deny the obvious.
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