So Twitter is under no immediate financial pressure. Elon could personally pay the debt interest for a few years, no problem.
Assume Twitter probably had excessive overhead and some suboptimal policies and a bad subscription model. If one were interested in optimizing Twitter, including user and advertiser experience, subscription model, and employee headcount and focus, wouldn’t the only move to be to engage a 10-20 person task force for two months to improve Twitter ways that aligns with Elon’s goals? I mean there have to be 20+ people at Twitter making $500k. What are these people doing making $500k if they can’t undertake this “optimize Twitter” project?
I don’t see how Elon decides to jump in and take a chainsaw and baseball bat to Twitter after one week. That seems just insane, and he would be immediately fired by the board if he were a non owner CEO. Wtf is he trying to accomplish?
I know Zuckerberg is flailing with the metaverse and all, but he seems to have a vision and a plan, even if bad. Elon just seems to be flinging poo at the wall. If that’s what he’s going to do, he could at least fling more carefully and not as rapidly.
I know this is a small point, but even if you are some piece of shit billionaire, you go and buy up media companies and then hire people to disseminate/amplify your atrocious views; you don’t buy Fox News or CNN and then do 8 hour shifts of you solo ranting at the teleprompter. This guy is the most pathetic of nut jobs and that he has any sway in shaping humanity’s relationship to advancing technologies is terrifying and probably the best argument in favor of a preemptive global EMP.
You might even spend some time doing this before closing so that you could move quickly once the handover took place…
But more generally, I’d speculate that part of the goal is to shift Twitter to a more start-uppy culture. The message is emphatically not, “We have to move carefully lest we break the well-oiled machine that is Twitter,” it’s “this business sucks, everyone needs to start working on the turnaround effective today, no excuses.” I’m skeptical that this will work because there’s no product vision, but I guess we’ll see.
No product vision, no product strategy, no hypothesis testing, no concern for org design or psychological safety, ust straight HIPPO bullshit. Etc etc. Sincerely, someone who works as head of product.
How much do we think he spent on the futile attempt to escape/renegotiate the acquisition deal? He’s clearly capable of pouring money, time, and effort into total horseshit based on his whim. His resources are essentially unlimited.