3 companies, 3 ex wives, like 7 kids, and a Twitter addiction. I suspect Elon’s secret is not actually
being overly involved with the companies. Kinda like Warren Buffett.
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Although honestly, I really do have to wonder how much it would cost to run twitter as like a barebones, anything goes, non revenue operation. I mean how much does webhosting really cost? If Unstuckpolitics scaled up to a billion users, how much would it cost to run?
A lot
The “secret” is that being a corporate CEO can be an order of magnitude easier than working at Starbucks for a living.
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“The Brands will save us!” is some next-level dystopian shit. Save us, Brands! Save us from the capitalist dickhead… hey wait…
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Actually, there’s a step before trying to get the ad money: it turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies.
relevant!
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Yeah. middle class protest actions are always pretty toothless and virtuey. It’s sad.
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I refuse to believe that’s real
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Yeah, my hot take is that the death of Twitter will be like the death of our politics and our ecosystem: not some big collapse, but it just gets gradually worse and we all adapt like the frog in the boiling pot. Elon will unban Kanye and Trump but still ban the overt Nazis and that will be the new normal. It’s shittier than the Twitter that you were used to, but also the influences and people who depend on social media aren’t going to resign in protest. It just gets shittier and the temp rises and we all just sit here.
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this shit is absolutely insane, dude literally is just mashing buttons
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Twitter needs revenue and banning Trump and Ye was done because they impacted revenue not because Twitter actually cared about what they said. Twitter can only get worse if Musk finds people willing to continue to shovel money into a bottomless pit. With current interest rates that has become a lot less likely.
This is exactly right. If Twitter becomes a dystopian hellscape, it just goes bankrupt right away. Most likely outcome is probably business as usual with some window dressing to try to mollify conservatives who feel aggrieved by the Babylon Bee getting banned, combined with a slightly larger version of the layoffs that were priced in anyways.* Next most likely outcome is that Musk unwittingly blunders over some tipping point and Twitter ends up in an unrecoverable death spiral of subscriber/advertiser exodus. Unlikely is that Musk achieves some master plan that makes Twitter materially better. Twitter’s problems are fundamentally product problems, not engineering problems. Elon is most successful when he takes an obviously great product (spaceship that can take people to Mars, $35k electric car that drives itself) and builds/motivates an engineering org to pursue it. Twitter already is a great engineering org, they just have terrible product management. “An everything app, with payments or something” is not the galvanizing vision that’s going to turn things around.
And then least likely of all is that he manages to turn Twitter into a disciplined right wing propaganda machine along the lines of the Murdoch empire. It’s hard to think of a major business figure with less message discipline than Musk.
* For anyone wondering how Twitter is going to patch the $400 million shortfall it has for debt service, the answer is basically to lay off a thousand engineers, which is 15% of its workforce. Then you lay off another thousand and you’re profitable! Or even better, get the engineers who are most ideologically opposed to you to leave of their own accord before you take over.
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How does that impact Twitter day-to-day? What do those people actually do?
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What language would Twitter’s code even be in that Elon thinks he could sit down and review it with the engineers? His last big coding effort was X.com 22 years ago, I don’t know how he found time in his 18 hours a day, 7 days a week schedule to brush up on Ruby.
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Elite profile picture.
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Twitter is big enough that minor performance improvements can really matter right?
I think his MO is to get people who are 100% bought in to his personality cult and then demand the impossible from them. It is a bold strategy, let’s see if it pays off.
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