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Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
891–900 of 1001 posts
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#892I‘ve been an Elon fanboy since pre-Falcon 1 times and all the time I could simply follow his first principles to the core, be it the switch to electric cars, flight control using a quorum cluster of non-space-rated processors or the viability of methane and stainless steel for Starship against all previous failures. With Twitter, I‘ve lost that feeling and I don‘t know how it would be possible: Free speech, happy adv…
>happy advertisers Why would we want this? I don't see this kind of pro-advertiser slant anywhere else but here. Is it because of the google/facebook employee presence here?
It is because twitter needs to earn money and the way they earn money is through advertisers.
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#893Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
He's really not. The banks are only involved so that he doesn't have to sell as much of his Tesla shares. And that's to say nothing of his private ownership of SpaceX, probably also worth a decent chunk.
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#894My 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…
Musk is going to discover (and maybe admit?) that fixing Twitter is harder than he thought. Yeah I think he's going to intensely focus on Twitter for ~6 months, not change much, get bored, and then move onto something else.
I think it's not exactly fair to compare Twitter with his other endeavours. Others are very hard problems. What Musk will do with twitter is figure out an action plan: IMO changing twitter into X will be a viable way of letting it survive. He's gonna chart a course of action that could work and give the reins to someone else for execution.
Musk's time is valuable given that he's leading a lot of companies. He's not going to sit around and mull over twitter. The best thing he can do is spend time => chart a plan => hire a capable CEO who is best at execution (Tim Cook for instance). If he spends more time on twitter, his other bets will get hurt disproportionately.
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#895Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I wonder how this jives with his stated plan to lay off a lot of people? If he wants to implement that he'll need a lot more engineers and related support staff.
It should be noted that there's no evidence that Elon ever said that.
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#896Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Lots of the “bots” are people. The solution is to show high quality content and suppress low quality content, regardless of input.
One persons high quality content is another person's trash.
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#897Firing 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…
You are spot on. That style of working or perspective towards policy is exactly what Musk wants to remove at the grassroots level.
Agreed that this wisdom and experience is not replaceable. But Musk intends to replace it with something else. If you think about it, Vijaya's perspectives and intuition is only going to pull back Musk's vision however vague that might be. Musk doesn't want to sit around and convince Vijaya of his opinion towards content moderation. I think if Vijaya showed appreciation or interest towards Musk's policy on some level at least, she would have had a non-zero chance to be around. The difference of opinion is at a stark contrast in my opinion.
This is the fastest and brutal way of Musk moving forward with his plan.
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#898Earlier quoted context omitted.
Musk is going to discover (and maybe admit?) that fixing Twitter is harder than he thought. Yeah I think he's going to intensely focus on Twitter for ~6 months, not change much, get bored, and then move onto something else.
I think it's not exactly fair to compare Twitter with his other endeavours. Others are very hard problems. What Musk will do with twitter is figure out an action plan: IMO changing twitter into X will be a viable way of letting it survive. He's gonna chart a course of action that could work and give the reins to someone else for execution. Musk's time is valuable given that he's leading a lot of companies. He's not g…
Twitter is a very hard problem because it’s not a technological or engineering challenge.
It’s politics, politics, politics. From all angles and perspectives, in the possibly most annoying way. You have to make so many politics and policy decisions that all have many up- and downsides and that are just plain hard to make.
From a technology perspective Twitter is not at all interesting and the rest is just plain annoying. Plus, it’s a small social network, mostly relevant because important people (imagine myself rolling my eyes here) are on it. So doing other social media stuff that rely on network effects? (Messenger, payment, ...) Not really realistic. Not because the technology is infeasible. None of this is a technological challenge. It’s just politics and network effects.
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#899Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaimer: Previously worked in Toyota's EV R&D division, opinions my own. > Remember, Tesla has to become bigger than Toyota to justify the stock price. It is not possible to do that at Tesla's current price points. It is not possible to do that at Tesla's current price points. Long term Tesla has to create a balance sheet and a narrative that convince people that it's current valuation is justified. Based on my ti…
What I want to see is Tesla come up with a sequel which is another hit. I feel like their car styling was comfortably out there when electric cars first came on to the scene but now it's become incredibly safe. Other companies, now they are building specific EVs rather than throwing some batteries in the back of an existing car and calling it an EV, are really starting to play with the concept and are making some gre…
>Cars like the Ionic 5 and the Honda-E for example are making the Tesla's look old hat.
Both those cars look hideous to me.
Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
#900I 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…
I think what you are talking about is morality and not honesty. Musk is brutally honest - with the people he works with, with the investors, with his followers on twitter and everyone. He is brutally honest by letting them know on their face what he thinks is right and wrong. I would argue that not being honest about something wouldn't make you move forward.
You can be brutally honest and immoral at the same time. Not leaving a note for scratching a parked car is being immoral to someone.
Morality doesn't get you up the ladder because there are certain hard decisions you need to make. You may argue that dishonesty can take you up. I think dishonesty can only take you so far. It definitely can't get you to become someone like Musk.