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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

#851

Post by jamesrom »

pj_mukh wrote: post #850
roughly wrote: post #831

Firing Vijaya is a hell of a move here. Parag had been in the CEO seat for less than a year and had no real experience, and Twitter's not such a unique company financially that the CFO is anything special, but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments, as well as navigate all the other kinds of various policy hell that is Twitter…

AFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands [1], while fighting for free speech mostly in the American context (and that too, just online). For that, he probably doesn't need Vijaya. I hope someone pays her buckets of money now to fight at the actual frontline of free speech (Texas government sanctioned book bans perhaps?) [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-free-speech-twitter-gl.…

> AFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands

citation needed

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#852

Post by seattle_spring »

jamesrom wrote: post #851
pj_mukh wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands [1], while fighting for free speech mostly in the American context (and that too, just online). For that, he probably doesn't need Vijaya. I hope someone pays her buckets of money now to fight at the actual frontline of free speech (Texas government sanctioned book bans perhaps?) [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-free-speech-twitter-gl.…

> AFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands citation needed

I mean... Broadly gestures at Musk's string of behaviors over the last 20 years

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#854

Post by brewdad »

planetsprite wrote: post #786
threeseed wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep talking about people as if you they are one homogenous block that you deeply understand and represent. Most people really couldn't care less about SpaceX, Tesla or the future of Twitter. And they definitely wouldn't put Musk at the pinnacle of cultural relevance. It's a minority of the population that is on sites like this that care. And for many of us there is a much more discerning and skeptical attitude t…

He has 111 million followers on twitter. He isn't some niche tech celebrity.

Half of them bots. As he discovered after bidding for ownership.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#856

Post by mapme »

batch12 wrote: post #600
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…

I'd work for twitter if they were less driven by political ideology. Maybe I am wrong, but it looks from the outside that one would have to walk the thought line to succeed in many of these west coast companies. Edit: If I am wrong (possible), help me understand why.

IME for engineering at these companies is that the social or political side of things is mostly irrelevant for Eng. Some folks want to be involved in internal activism but it’s easy to ignore and basically never comes up in Eng work. Ppl just avoid politics like normies and talk about average stuff like “how’s your kid?” not “let’s go to that protest”. Lots of good smart technical peeps more likely to nerd out on cool tech stuff than be political.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#857

Post by nr2x »

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.

Labor is cheap depending on where you go.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#858

Post by nr2x »

edmundsauto wrote: post #682
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…

One of his challenges will be to pay $1.2B in interest payments every year while also making good on the principal. That's quite a bit of debt for a struggling financial situation. Cutting HC will help in the short term; it is unclear if those cuts will be well executed. HN opinion that twitter could run with 200 engineers is woefully naive for a massive company that is under FTC consent order - they probably have >2…

He’s owned by bankers now. Totally.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#859

Post by anshumankmr »

I have mixed feelings towards the whole acquisition story but the amount of racism and vitriol towards Gadde due to her highly controversial content moderation policies is obscenely high. I spent five minutes in Musk's "utopian" Twitter mostly going through the trending news topic of the acquisition and right wingers from US and India have been spamming the threads with ad hominems against her. Makes me glad I don't browse Twitter in general.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#860

Post by pj_mukh »

jamesrom wrote: post #851
pj_mukh wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands [1], while fighting for free speech mostly in the American context (and that too, just online). For that, he probably doesn't need Vijaya. I hope someone pays her buckets of money now to fight at the actual frontline of free speech (Texas government sanctioned book bans perhaps?) [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-free-speech-twitter-gl.…

> AFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands citation needed

citation added.
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