Twitter (2 Viewers)

[beer 30]

Man I love me some Twitter dumpster fires and with Elon purchasing the platform, it has only gotten better.

 

[Dinsy Ejotuz]

Sidenote: Tesla is now 50%+ off its high. The similarity between the TSLA, BTC, AMC and GME charts would give me pause if I had any money it it.

 

[krista4]

@krista4 - in your view what is the upside to Musk’s behavior? Have you ever seen anything like this in any of the deals you’ve worked on?

I’m baffled by how crazy this seems to be, but perhaps I’m just “woke” and Musk is 8 steps ahead.

I appreciate your asking, and I have absolutely no idea. Have never seen anything like it.

I'd actually hoped that, despite all surface appearances in his mishandling of the acquisition, he did have some eighth-level thinking going on, but he seems to be well beyond "rich quirky guy but with a plan" right now. It almost appears he actually wants to blow it up. I suppose he has the money to turn it into a place that only serves a niche market. From what I can gather so far, that niche market would be "those who wonder what Elon's all up about now." If he wanted that, he didn't need to pay $44 billion for it.

 

[krista4]

Sidenote: Tesla is now 50%+ off its high. The similarity between the TSLA, BTC, AMC and GME charts would give me pause if I had any money it it.

This is where he's going to hit trouble (and GroveDiesel alluded to it above). He can do whatever he wants with Twitter now that it's privately owned. But he has fiduciary duties to the shareholders of his public company, and arguably he is not meeting those right now.

 

[Ilov80s]

appreciate your asking, and I have absolutely no idea. Have never seen anything like it. I'd actually hoped that, despite all surface appearances in his mishandling of the acquisition, he did have some eighth-level thinking going on, but he seems to be well beyond "rich quirky guy but with a plan" right now. It almost appears he actually wants to blow it up. I suppose he has the money to turn it into a place that only serves a niche market. From what I can gather so far, that niche market would be "those who wonder what Elon's all up about now." If he wanted that, he didn't need to pay $44 billion for it.

Is he copying Jeremy Renner who hilariously had his own social media app that was the equivalent of being on Insta except Jeremy Renner was the only person you could follow.

In all seriousness, he’s either having a Kanye break or he’s intentionally sabotaging Twitter in order to break the existing community there and perhaps replace it with another.

 

[General Malaise]

Quesadilla with all the young, pretty girls that are following me on Twitter? I don't know them, I almost never tweet anymore, and nice looking ladies (let's be fair - ALL ladies) avoid me like the plague in real life. Are these real people or Russian bots trying to bilk me out of my hundreds of dollars?

 

[Ilov80s]

Quesadilla with all the young, pretty girls that are following me on Twitter? I don't know them, I almost never tweet anymore, and nice looking ladies (let's be fair - ALL ladies) avoid me like the plague in real life. Are these real people or Russian bots trying to bilk me out of my hundreds of dollars?

Just young attractive women who are desperate for a no strings attached animalistic love affair with a random older man.

 

[TheMagus]

It might be a good idea for him to stop posting for a couple of days.

There is an interesting element to this that dawned on me when I saw a tweet earlier. I can't remember the exact post but it was something to the effect of "Can you please stop? My small business relies on this platform. I'll pay you $8 but can you please stop tweeting??"

There are likely a ton of people out there that use Twitter for their businesses or other reasons that care absolutely not a thing about the pro-Elon/anti-Elon shenanigans and just want the platform they have been using for years to remain stable.

 

[Ilov80s]

There is an interesting element to this that dawned on me when I saw a tweet earlier. I can't remember the exact post but it was something to the effect of "Can you please stop? My small business relies on this platform. I'll pay you $8 but can you please stop tweeting??"

There are likely a ton of people out there that use Twitter for their businesses or other reasons that care absolutely not a thing about the pro-Elon/anti-Elon shenanigans and just want the platform they have been using for years to remain stable.

Yeah and a ton of authors, independent journalists, etc. who don’t make much money or have major support but have spent 10 years building a massive audience for their often quite niche service/product. It will be economically devastating to a lot of people if Twitter fails. Those mostly impacted aren’t big media or global elite or corporations. It’s the random bloggers, artists, fantasy analysts, etc who don’t have ESPN or CNN behind them. It’s a massive human network at stake here.

 

[IvanKaramazov]

It might be a good idea for him to stop posting for a couple of days.

There is an interesting element to this that dawned on me when I saw a tweet earlier. I can't remember the exact post but it was something to the effect of "Can you please stop? My small business relies on this platform. I'll pay you $8 but can you please stop tweeting??"

There are likely a ton of people out there that use Twitter for their businesses or other reasons that care absolutely not a thing about the pro-Elon/anti-Elon shenanigans and just want the platform they have been using for years to remain stable.

I'm growing a little weary of 25% of my Twitter TL being commentary about Twitter itself. But that's at least an improvement from a few days ago when meta-commentary made up about 90% of my TL.

You know those threads we always have every couple of years when there's some moderation action on this forum and a couple dozen people respond like children? It's like being locked in a room with those people right now, and nobody has a key to get out.

 

[CletiusMaximus]

Its possible Matt Levine at Bloomberg nailed it back in April:

Oh Elon​

Look this all makes complete sense, obvious, intuitive, simple sense. If you are the richest person in the world, and annoying, and you constantly play a computer game, and you get a lot of enjoyment and a sense of identity from that game and are maybe a little addicted, then at some point you might have some suggestions for improvements in the game. So you might leave comments and email the company that makes the game saying “hey you should try my ideas.” And the company might ignore you (or respond politely but not move fast enough for your liking). It might occur to you: “Look, I am the richest person in the world; how much could this game company possibly cost? I should just buy it and change the game however I want.” Even if your complaints are quite minor, why shouldn’t you get to play exactly the game you want? Even if you have no complaints, why not own the game you love, just to make sure it continues to be exactly what you want? The game is Twitter, the richest person in the world is Elon Musk, and:

Elon Musk has taken a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc. to become the platform’s biggest shareholder, a week after hinting he might shake up the social media industry.
Twitter shares surged about 26% in premarket trading after Musk’s purchase was revealed Monday in a regulatory filing. The stake is worth about $2.89 billion, based on Friday’s market close.
Musk, 50, polled his more than 80 million followers on Twitter last month, asking them whether the company adheres to the principles of free speech. After more than 70% said no, he asked whether a new platform was needed and said he was giving serious thought to starting his own.

I hope that if Elon Musk is going to do activism on Twitter, it will not be for tedious “free speech” advocacy. I hope it is like:

Twitter’s relatively new chief executive officer, Parag Agrawal: Welcome, Mr. Musk. We’re so glad that you are our biggest shareholder. We have prepared a presentation showing how we are executing on our strategy of being more technically nimble, building new products and growing revenue and active users. Here on slide 1 you can see—
Elon Musk: Make the font bigger when I tweet.
Agrawal: What?
Musk: I am your biggest shareholder, I want the font on my tweets to be bigger than the font on everyone else’s tweets.
Agrawal: That’s not really how we—
Musk: And I want 290 characters. Again, just for me.
Agrawal: …
Musk: And it should play a little sound when I tweet so everyone knows.
Agrawal: I just feel like we want to make a good product for all of our millions of users? I feel like that is going to improve profitability in the long run and, as our largest shareholder, you in particular stand to benefit from—
Musk: Oh I don’t care even a little bit about that, if your stock doubles that is rounding error on my net worth, I just love tweeting and want to meddle a bit to optimize it for my personal needs.

 

[Joe Bryant]

It might be a good idea for him to stop posting for a couple of days.

This seems like a good idea.

 

[Joe Bryant]

I'm growing a little weary of 25% of my Twitter TL being commentary about Twitter itself. But that's at least an improvement from a few days ago when meta-commentary made up about 90% of my TL.

You know those threads we always have every couple of years when there's some moderation action on this forum and a couple dozen people respond like children? It's like being locked in a room with those people right now, and nobody has a key to get out.

Agreed.

 

[Dinsy Ejotuz]

"Can you please stop? My small business relies on this platform. I'll pay you $8 but can you please stop tweeting??"

So woke.

My experience on Twitter must be very different from most folks. I have around 2000 followers and follow about 80 accounts across a range of subject experts and etc, and virtually never have anything bad cross my TL. Other than a couple porn bots I don't recall having to flag anything to Twitter and don't even remember getting a negative DM or reply.

I think it's just a fantastic tool and hope they find a way to monetize it that makes sense for all the stakeholders.

 

[Joe Bryant]

There are likely a ton of people out there that use Twitter for their businesses or other reasons that care absolutely not a thing about the pro-Elon/anti-Elon shenanigans and just want the platform they have been using for years to remain stable.

That's a great point and illustrates something I always tell folks who are looking to build a business that depends on communication with customers: Build your email list.

Because you can control that.

You could have a zillion facebook or Instagram or twitter followers. But the platform controls your ability to communicate with them. That's always risky.

 

[tommyGunZ]

Sidenote: Tesla is now 50%+ off its high. The similarity between the TSLA, BTC, AMC and GME charts would give me pause if I had any money it it.

This is where he's going to hit trouble (and GroveDiesel alluded to it above). He can do whatever he wants with Twitter now that it's privately owned. But he has fiduciary duties to the shareholders of his public company, and arguably he is not meeting those right now.

To your point, this seems like a bad idea: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-more-than-50-tesla-engineers-into-twitter.html

 

[Juxtatarot]

There are likely a ton of people out there that use Twitter for their businesses or other reasons that care absolutely not a thing about the pro-Elon/anti-Elon shenanigans and just want the platform they have been using for years to remain stable.

That's a great point and illustrates something I always tell folks who are looking to build a business that depends on communication with customers: Build your email list.

Because you can control that.

You could have a zillion facebook or Instagram or twitter followers. But the platform controls your ability to communicate with them. That's always risky.

I don’t know. It seems that personal emails are dying. Too much junk.

 

[krista4]

Sidenote: Tesla is now 50%+ off its high. The similarity between the TSLA, BTC, AMC and GME charts would give me pause if I had any money it it.

This is where he's going to hit trouble (and GroveDiesel alluded to it above). He can do whatever he wants with Twitter now that it's privately owned. But he has fiduciary duties to the shareholders of his public company, and arguably he is not meeting those right now.

To your point, this seems like a bad idea: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-more-than-50-tesla-engineers-into-twitter.html

Seems I could take the word “arguably” out of my post, based on this.

 

[Desert_Power]

There are likely a ton of people out there that use Twitter for their businesses or other reasons that care absolutely not a thing about the pro-Elon/anti-Elon shenanigans and just want the platform they have been using for years to remain stable.

That's a great point and illustrates something I always tell folks who are looking to build a business that depends on communication with customers: Build your email list.

Because you can control that.

You could have a zillion facebook or Instagram or twitter followers. But the platform controls your ability to communicate with them. That's always risky.

I don’t know. It seems that personal emails are dying. Too much junk.

It takes work on the user side to filter out a lot of junk. I think Joe is talking from the business/content creator side though. The email list of your customers or readers is a lot more yours than a list of social media followers. Your social media account could disappear or get locked without any notice with little recourse.

 

[Joe Bryant]

It takes work on the user side to filter out a lot of junk. I think Joe is talking from the business/content creator side though. The email list of your customers or readers is a lot more yours than a list of social media followers. Your social media account could disappear without any notice with little recourse.

Absolutely. No platform is perfect. But with email, you have some control. With a social media platform, they control your ability to communicate with the "follower".

 

[bigbottom]

Sidenote: Tesla is now 50%+ off its high. The similarity between the TSLA, BTC, AMC and GME charts would give me pause if I had any money it it.

This is where he's going to hit trouble (and GroveDiesel alluded to it above). He can do whatever he wants with Twitter now that it's privately owned. But he has fiduciary duties to the shareholders of his public company, and arguably he is not meeting those right now.

To your point, this seems like a bad idea: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-more-than-50-tesla-engineers-into-twitter.html

Seems I could take the word “arguably” out of my post, based on this.

I sure hope there is an inter-company service charge with an appropriate mark up.

 

[Ilov80s]

That's a great point and illustrates something I always tell folks who are looking to build a business that depends on communication with customers: Build your email list.

Because you can control that.

You could have a zillion facebook or Instagram or twitter followers. But the platform controls your ability to communicate with them. That's always risky.

Great advice. Though email is nowhere near as effective. I hate opening and looking at email. I want to get in, find the specific thing I am expecting and get out. A company isn’t likely to catch my attention there where as Twitter or IG are places I will go just to kill some time and scroll to check things out.

 

[The General]

Hadn’t followed Elon’s tweets that much until recently. They kinda look like the stereotypical “drunk Uncle”. Typos, Dad Jokes, some nonsensical stuff mixed in. He just happens to own the whole company now

 

[GroveDiesel]

Sidenote: Tesla is now 50%+ off its high. The similarity between the TSLA, BTC, AMC and GME charts would give me pause if I had any money it it.

This is where he's going to hit trouble (and GroveDiesel alluded to it above). He can do whatever he wants with Twitter now that it's privately owned. But he has fiduciary duties to the shareholders of his public company, and arguably he is not meeting those right now.

To your point, this seems like a bad idea: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-more-than-50-tesla-engineers-into-twitter.html

He also leveraged a bunch of his Tesla stock to purchase Twitter. So if Twitter fails, it will have a very real negative impact on Tesla as well.

 

[tommyGunZ]

Hadn’t followed Elon’s tweets that much until recently. They kinda look like the stereotypical “drunk Uncle”. Typos, Dad Jokes, some nonsensical stuff mixed in. He just happens to own the whole company now

You missed a few tweets that he deleted.

Here’s a cartoon from an ex-software engineer: https://twitter.com/lmanul/status/1589732855449804800?s=46&t=4AH3ZFnns_P8xeIb1lc1CQ

 

[uwillbsoon]

Sounds like he already missed a deadline, no?

I know he's saying they aren't rolling out the new Twitter blue because of the election, but sure seems like they tried to and it didn't work. He initially said it would be out today.

 

[The General]

Hadn’t followed Elon’s tweets that much until recently. They kinda look like the stereotypical “drunk Uncle”. Typos, Dad Jokes, some nonsensical stuff mixed in. He just happens to own the whole company now

You missed a few tweets that he deleted.

Here’s a cartoon from an ex-software engineer: https://twitter.com/lmanul/status/1589732855449804800?s=46&t=4AH3ZFnns_P8xeIb1lc1CQ

This is my Aunt Rita level comedy.

 

[TheMagus]

Sounds like he already missed a deadline, no?

I know he's saying they aren't rolling out the new Twitter blue because of the election, but sure seems like they tried to and it didn't work. He initially said it would be out today.

What? He couldn't get his programmers (a portion of which he may have fired) to change the whole model of the platform with millions of users into a subscription model in a couple of days? Shocking, I tell you!

 

[Insomniac]

It might be a good idea for him to stop posting for a couple of days.

This seems like a good idea.

Doesn't seem like he's following my advice.

 

[Ilov80s]

Doesn't seem like he's following my advice.

Nope, he’s on there now saying Twitter usage is at all time high and telling people to vote a specific party tomorrow. I am quite certain he recently said Twitter wasn’t supposed to be political. He seems to contradict himself or his messaging daily. I am more certain each day this is a joke to him and he’s trying to upend Twitter for reasons that’l aren’t financial. I mean can you imagine if Joe acted like this around here?

 

[TheMagus]

Doesn't seem like he's following my advice.

Narrator: Elon Musk is definitely not following Insomniac's advice.

 

[Shutout]

It might be a good idea for him to stop posting for a couple of days.

There is an interesting element to this that dawned on me when I saw a tweet earlier. I can't remember the exact post but it was something to the effect of "Can you please stop? My small business relies on this platform. I'll pay you $8 but can you please stop tweeting??"

There are likely a ton of people out there that use Twitter for their businesses or other reasons that care absolutely not a thing about the pro-Elon/anti-Elon shenanigans and just want the platform they have been using for years to remain stable.

I'm growing a little weary of 25% of my Twitter TL being commentary about Twitter itself. But that's at least an improvement from a few days ago when meta-commentary made up about 90% of my TL.

You know those threads we always have every couple of years when there's some moderation action on this forum and a couple dozen people respond like children? It's like being locked in a room with those people right now, and nobody has a key to get out.

On Twitter, just like here, you (we) have always had the option to simply not participate if it bothers us.

 

[Don Quixote]

I'm growing a little weary of 25% of my Twitter TL being commentary about Twitter itself. But that's at least an improvement from a few days ago when meta-commentary made up about 90% of my TL.

You know those threads we always have every couple of years when there's some moderation action on this forum and a couple dozen people respond like children? It's like being locked in a room with those people right now, and nobody has a key to get out.

I added “Elon” and “Musk” to my muted words on Twitter. Find Twitter much better that way.

 

[Insomniac]

Doesn't seem like he's following my advice.

Nope, he’s on there now saying Twitter usage is at all time high and telling people to vote a specific party tomorrow. I am quite certain he recently said Twitter wasn’t supposed to be political. He seems to contradict himself or his messaging daily. I am more certain each day this is a joke to him and he’s trying to upend Twitter for reasons that’l aren’t financial. I mean can you imagine if Joe acted like this around here?

Yeah I saw his "vote GOP" post. Doesn't seem rational for him to constantly post things that alienate half of his audience, Maybe he has so much money he doesn't care if he losees this entire investment in twitter.
I remember the good old days when Bill Gates was the most hated plutocrat in America. These days he's just an afterthought. For a long time I thought Zuck was #1 but it looks like Elon has taken over the top spot.

 

[TheMagus]

Doesn't seem like he's following my advice.

Nope, he’s on there now saying Twitter usage is at all time high and telling people to vote a specific party tomorrow. I am quite certain he recently said Twitter wasn’t supposed to be political. He seems to contradict himself or his messaging daily. I am more certain each day this is a joke to him and he’s trying to upend Twitter for reasons that’l aren’t financial. I mean can you imagine if Joe acted like this around here?

Yeah I saw his "vote GOP" post. Doesn't seem rational for him to constantly post things that alienate half of his audience, Maybe he has so much money he doesn't care if he losees this entire investment in twitter.
I remember the good old days when Bill Gates was the most hated plutocrat in America. These days he's just an afterthought. For a long time I thought Zuck was #1 but it looks like Elon has taken over the top spot.

Probably doesn't help to sell really expensive electric cars to people that may be in the group of people he is rampaging against.

 

[Shutout]

There is an interesting element to this that dawned on me when I saw a tweet earlier. I can't remember the exact post but it was something to the effect of "Can you please stop? My small business relies on this platform. I'll pay you $8 but can you please stop tweeting??"

There are likely a ton of people out there that use Twitter for their businesses or other reasons that care absolutely not a thing about the pro-Elon/anti-Elon shenanigans and just want the platform they have been using for years to remain stable.

Yeah and a ton of authors, independent journalists, etc. who don’t make much money or have major support but have spent 10 years building a massive audience for their often quite niche service/product. It will be economically devastating to a lot of people if Twitter fails. Those mostly impacted aren’t big media or global elite or corporations. It’s the random bloggers, artists, fantasy analysts, etc who don’t have ESPN or CNN behind them. It’s a massive human network at stake here.

This is the world as it works everyday and is not special. We survived before Twitter and will after. Small businesses around the world fail every day due to someone else's decision. A manufacturer who depends on someone else's decision to supply a product or keep supplying it at a certain price and delivering it as they promise, etc. Parlor, as an example, was growing and making a presence until Amazon, another company, made a decision to pull the platform they dpended on. It happens.

One of my best friend's sister is a very successful published author and script writer with a lot of work out there. She has Twitter, among other things so I asked her her take on this scenario and her reply was "if an author, publisher, journalist, etc is depending on Twitter to prevent their demise then they aren't nearly the established author, publisher, journalist, etc they thought they were.". In these lines of works and likely many others, it is going to be a very, very small percentage that actually live an ddie by Twitter or any one SM entity. There is not nearly as dire a stake here as it is presented.

 

[Ilov80s]

This is the world as it works everyday and is not special. We survived before Twitter and will after. Small businesses around the world fail every day due to someone else's decision. A manufacturer who depends on someone else's decision to supply a product or keep supplying it at a certain price and delivering it as they promise, etc. Parlor, as an example, was growing and making a presence until Amazon, another company, made a decision to pull the platform they dpended on. It happens.

One of my best friend's sister is a very successful published author and script writer with a lot of work out there. She has Twitter, among other things so I asked her her take on this scenario and her reply was "if an author, publisher, journalist, etc is depending on Twitter to prevent their demise then they aren't nearly the established author, publisher, journalist, etc they thought they were.". In these lines of works and likely many others, it is going to be a very, very small percentage that actually live an ddie by Twitter or any one SM entity. There is not nearly as dire a stake here as it is presented.

Yeah that’s kind of the point, the ones who will lose out are the ones who aren’t super successful and have only been able to find their niche audience through Twitter. There’s a ton of freelance writers out there making very little money. And yes I know people lose their income all the time. It doesn’t change how I feel about the potential of more people losing income. It’s worrisome to see someone be so careless taking over an international business and community with hundreds of millions of users, many who have their careers entangled with it.

 

[uwillbsoon]

Now there's reporting that if Twitter Blue does go live and cut ads by half to subscribers (as was mentioned in the rollout), Twitter might lose money on those subscribers. The lost ad revenue would be about $6 per subscriber. And Google and Apple take 30% of that $8 payment, potentially. You'd think someone did the math, so that can't be true.

And Musk and David Sacks have discussed charging everyone for access in some type of freemium model where you get limited access if you don't pay. Given Sacks' B2B SaaS background, that's not surprising.

I think my favorite, though, is some staff were told to listen to Sacks' podcast for a macro view of why the layoffs happened. Musk hasn't addressed the staff in any form (email, all-staff meeting) since he took over.

Musk discusses putting all of Twitter behind a paywall

Will he go through with it? PLUS: Botched layoffs, how the new Blue could lose money, and more

www.platformer.news

 

[Juxtatarot]

Musk hasn't addressed the staff in any form (email, all-staff meeting) since he took over.

That’s both terrible and badass.

 

[Sammy3469]

Chris Sacca seems to have a pretty dim view of what’s happening.

https://twitter.com/sacca/status/1589732881232203776?s=46&t=pZipTRPFb1ogReT2mpcr7w

 

[uwillbsoon]

Musk hasn't addressed the staff in any form (email, all-staff meeting) since he took over.

That’s both terrible and badass.

As an employee, I wouldn't find it encouraging. A lot of employees don't know who their manager is. Those that aren't working on musk's pet projects don't know what to do, while those that are on his pet projects are working around the clock. Musk is the ultimate decision-maker on everything Twitter Blue according to their internal slack. Everything must go through him. Sometimes those decisions are communicated by tweet, so employees are left scrambling.

Seems terribly inefficient.

Open enrollment was supposed to start today and employees haven't been given any info. Don't know if they still even have benefits. Management hasn't responded to their questions.

The ones that were let go and now being asked to come back don't know what happens if they refuse. Will they get paid for three months? Or is Twitter trying to get them to "quit" so they don't have to pay them?

What a trainwreck.

 

[Sammy3469]

Doesn't seem like he's following my advice.

Nope, he’s on there now saying Twitter usage is at all time high and telling people to vote a specific party tomorrow. I am quite certain he recently said Twitter wasn’t supposed to be political. He seems to contradict himself or his messaging daily. I am more certain each day this is a joke to him and he’s trying to upend Twitter for reasons that’l aren’t financial. I mean can you imagine if Joe acted like this around here?

Yeah I saw his "vote GOP" post. Doesn't seem rational for him to constantly post things that alienate half of his audience, Maybe he has so much money he doesn't care if he losees this entire investment in twitter.
I remember the good old days when Bill Gates was the most hated plutocrat in America. These days he's just an afterthought. For a long time I thought Zuck was #1 but it looks like Elon has taken over the top spot.

Probably doesn't help to sell really expensive electric cars to people that may be in the group of people he is rampaging against.

I keep coming back to this…I’m not sure alienating the type of people buying your real product is really that smart in your side hustle.

 

[tommyGunZ]

Do people actually admire that guy? Because from where I sit I would never buy one of his products. What a major a-hole he seems to be.

Yeah, he’s lost a buyer here as well. Probably going to upgrade from my i3 soon and a Model X has been the apple of my eye since it came out. After this, no way.

 

[Joe Summer]

Do people actually admire that guy? Because from where I sit I would never buy one of his products. What a major a-hole he seems to be.

I think many people admire him for who he pwns, not for what he produces.

 

[Desert_Power]

Do people actually admire that guy? Because from where I sit I would never buy one of his products. What a major a-hole he seems to be.

I think many people admire him for who he pwns, not for what he produces.

I think there is a lot more than that to his appeal. I have debated this with friends long before this current turn to politics and buffoonery from him. I think there is a lot to admire in what SpaceX and Tesla (to a lesser extent) have done. Things like the Hyperloop always seemed like obvious bullcrap to me. As time has gone on, it was clear that this Tesla FSD thing was just going to be hype.

So I think it is a bit more mixed. Or it used to be.

 

[Joe Bryant]

As mentioned above, this is a good thread from Chris Sacca.

As you may know, Sacca is an OG internet legend and someone who knows Musk well.

His main point is a great one I think - companies and groups need people that can challenge the leader.

Twitter doesn't appear to have that now. And good companies need it.

 

[FairWarning]

There is an interesting element to this that dawned on me when I saw a tweet earlier. I can't remember the exact post but it was something to the effect of "Can you please stop? My small business relies on this platform. I'll pay you $8 but can you please stop tweeting??"

There are likely a ton of people out there that use Twitter for their businesses or other reasons that care absolutely not a thing about the pro-Elon/anti-Elon shenanigans and just want the platform they have been using for years to remain stable.

Yeah and a ton of authors, independent journalists, etc. who don’t make much money or have major support but have spent 10 years building a massive audience for their often quite niche service/product. It will be economically devastating to a lot of people if Twitter fails. Those mostly impacted aren’t big media or global elite or corporations. It’s the random bloggers, artists, fantasy analysts, etc who don’t have ESPN or CNN behind them. It’s a massive human network at stake here.

To me, this is the draw of Twitter.

 

[SWC]

i like twitter because it has a bird and birds in case you havent noticed are pretty darn cute take that to the bank brotweetos

 

[fatness]

Due to the layoffs and reassigning remaining people to other jobs, some parts of Twitter are beginning to break.
https://www.technologyreview.com/20...gineer-says-it-will-break-in-the-coming-weeks

Krueger says that Twitter won’t blink out of life, but we’ll start to see a greater number of tweets not loading, and accounts coming into and out of existence seemingly at a whim. “I would expect anything that’s writing data on the back end to possibly have slowness, timeouts, and a lot more subtle types of failure conditions,” he says. “But they’re often more insidious. And they also generally take a lot more effort to track down and resolve. If you don’t have enough engineers, that’s going to be a significant problem.”

 

[uwillbsoon]

As mentioned above, this is a good thread from Chris Sacca.

As you may know, Sacca is an OG internet legend and someone who knows Musk well.

His main point is a great one I think - companies and groups need people that can challenge the leader.

Twitter doesn't appear to have that now. And good companies need it.

The interesting thing here: if you read between the lines, Sacks and Calacanis are likely who these people are talking about. I don't think they're well-liked in these Silicon Valley circles.

Due to the layoffs and reassigning remaining people to other jobs, some parts of Twitter are beginning to break.
https://www.technologyreview.com/20...gineer-says-it-will-break-in-the-coming-weeks

Krueger says that Twitter won’t blink out of life, but we’ll start to see a greater number of tweets not loading, and accounts coming into and out of existence seemingly at a whim. “I would expect anything that’s writing data on the back end to possibly have slowness, timeouts, and a lot more subtle types of failure conditions,” he says. “But they’re often more insidious. And they also generally take a lot more effort to track down and resolve. If you don’t have enough engineers, that’s going to be a significant problem.”

This likely would have happened even if they'd kept the majority of their staff. Musk is trying to move fast. That means prioritizing new features. Those features would have pulled more resources from big fixes, refactoring, etc. But cutting staff exacerbates the issue.

I also heard Musk wants to cut $1 billion from infrastructure costs. That could be very difficult and could cause additional performance issues.