I know people have thought Twitter was mismanaged for a while, but seems like it's a lot worse than I thought it was (and the CEO seems more vindictively bad than I would have guessed).
Plus the total lack of principles around speech and just doing whatever Russia, India, or KSA wants? Including hiring foreign agents? Also covering up bad security issues in reporting? It'll be interesting to see what happens from here as more comes out.
The internal Twitter email: https://twitter.com/austen/status/1562150058727919616?s=21&t...
I'm no fan of Musk (he's truly worked very hard to be the most provacatively pustulent punkass of tech) but that doesn't mean that Twitter leadership is any better. Just not as well PR'd.
Dorsey himself was mostly an imbecile who drank too much of his own Kool Aid. Twitter has for years been the standard bearer for the most opaque, and incoherent content management; from user feedback to bots, just a village with only idiots. It was eventually going to catch up to them, the question now is to whom does the bulk of the suffering land on, not whether it lands or not.
High assurance comes from the overall systems design and testing, not the software itself. Afterall, radiation can cause any piece of software, including those written in Ada, to completely skip instructions.
A lot of stuff is still going on legacy stacks that Ada was created to replace
He waived all of that to force Twitter to agree to the deal (because it'd be basically impossible for the board to reject it). This made sense at the time, because the board was looking for ways to weasel out of it because (imo) they politically don't like Musk. Then the market crashed and suddenly he was overpaying a ton for Twitter, then he complains about bots (this isn't new information from when he made the deal).
Whether or not the bots thing is true isn't even relevant based on the deal he put forward.
I think he earnestly wanted to buy Twitter for principled reasons around speech which I agree with. He structured the deal in such a way where Twitter's board couldn't reject it (because it was so favorable to shareholders). Then when the market tanked the deal way overpriced Twitter, but he had already committed to it so he's trying everything to get out of it. I suspect he actually believes the things he's arguing (he's always seemed pretty earnest to me), I just think he's wrong in this case and it's mostly driven by motivated reasoning.
That doesn't mean Twitter isn't a disaster, just that they're in the right with regard to him having to close the deal.
That's not how business valuations work (it's how speculation works). If Twitter was fairly valued by Elon Musk before the crash then it would be fairly valued now - the fundamentals of the business haven't changed.
Implicitly, this was always, "I'm going to trade X% of Tesla for 100% of Twitter." Then the valuation of both Twitter and Tesla dropped, so to the extent that you think the "value" of a business is wholly determined by its fundamentals, then okay, they're both still the same "value" but now have lower prices.
Except that he hadn't sold the Tesla yet, so he was trading Tesla (at new lower price) for Twitter (at old higher price), and if you previously thought that X% of Tesla was worth Twitter, and Twitter is still worth the same thing, it's now X+Y% of Tesla.
Of course, it's not like the fundamentals of Twitter didn't change. Twitter's revenue comes from advertising, and it's entirely reasonable to believe that it was actually materially affected by the economic downturn, not just in terms of the speculation of the stock, but by how the business functions.
(None of this is to take the position that Musk ought to be able to back out of the deal: if the market had gone even hotter and now Musk could've traded less than X% of Tesla for the agreed upon, now conservative price for Twitter, it's not like the deal would've been renegotiated.)
That's a big if - I think a lot of this stuff is more speculation than any sort of fundamental cash flow valuation. A lot Twitter's actual value (its network effect and influence) is hard to measure anyway.
Some "fundamentals" of a business like twitter's value are:
1. Product/market fit, finances, etc. What you mean by "fundamentals" I think.
2. How easy it is for them to raise money (i.e. the "public sentiment" of VC towards their company and the industry)
3. How likely it is for regulation to stifle their growth, which is a derivative of public sentiment.
4. How much shares can be sold for, i.e. the public sentiment about how much it's worth.
5. Predicted future sentiment of their users and of advertisers, both of which impact expected future revenue.
2-5 all change with public sentiment, and a market crash changes public sentiment of many companies at once.
It's self-evident that elon musk is overpaying more now than before unless you insist that twitter's value is not actually related to 2-5 above, or 2-5 above should have been trivially predictable 100% accurately already as part of its "fundamentals", both of which seem obviously silly.
Twitter is a tyre pyre, but he should have thought about that before putting ink on that deal.
How often has that happened in the entire history?
Profoundly dumb people have been heads of state, CEOs etc. So why not the richest person in the world?
Alternative suggestion would be that he doesnt actually believe that the reason he is trying not to buy twitter is the reason he was buying twitter.
It's simple to explain away - other people have appointed heads of state. And I have not heard of an idiot (in medical sense) top20 Forbes list CEO who's also been there since day 1 (i.e. the founder, not some figurehead appointed by a board for an arbitrary reason).
Can you appoint yourself the strongest person in the world or the fastest 100m runner in the world?
[0]While someone like the Saudi king or Putin can in theory allocate their respective states' funds to themselves and thus become the richest, that would simply be converting power into money, and not a result of some kind of entrepreneurial ability.
>If 5 billion people flip coins all day long one of them will eventually flip only heads all day.
This argument is flawed since that would assume a person would win some money every time they flipped correctly, when in reality nobody is going to pay anyone for succeeding in a flip. And applying that directly to business also breaks down because it is self-evident that the ways to lose money greatly outnumber the ways to gain money.
I tend to like people that blow up social norms and conventions
That’s not a “major error in judgement”. That’s the behavior of a completely deranged individual.
That's quite a large exaggeration. I can think of some much much worse things that an actual "completely deranged individual" would do.
Musk was butthurt and lashed out. That does not equal "completely deranged individual"
Lashed out in a way where, given his influence, he could easily ruin the person's life. Which is bad in and of itself. But he did it while the man was actively involved in trying to save a dozen children from immediate death. And then doubled down later.
That is deranged.
When you have the kind of audience and pull he has, unless you are totally daft to it (which he shows no sign of) then yes it's very abusively deranged.
Twitter is most definitely not doing whatever Russia wants. It's markedly hostile to Russia and frequently removes "pro-Russia" acocunts, which speaks to your initial point, that it has a total lack of principles around speech.
He never struck me then, or in any interview or write up since, that he's impulsive, or prone to taking actions like what he's done to Twitter, in a cavalier way. He saw something bad and thinks something should be done to address it.
He likely made that decision because the culture at Twitter is as bolloxed as he states (maybe worse), and that it's one thing to fire a guy, but to do so to hide damning truths, and expect that person to just accept their fate AND let you get away with it without a cost is in this day and age, a farcical hope. Your "Mudge knows the implications of "whistleblowing". He has been a security consultant and even testified to Congress. He's not some noob that doesn't understand security or how systems work together to provide services like disclosure to FTC. The idea that Twitter PR can pooh-pooh away his concerns is shockingly stupid." is spot-on.