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 more like Telegram + Instagram, with channels, better DMs, "Moments", and more.

There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more. China's proven that it can be done. It would create a far bigger moat and network effects, and likely be as successful as Microsoft Teams & 365, a highly integrated solution, are for work.

Umm.. Facebook? Just offering all those features doesn't mean much though, you really have to be dominant in each one, since there's much less moat to debundling consumer apps vs enterprise

Because it would be incredibly convenient. Link a restaurent to your friends in a chat, talk about going there, all of them have the location and you can split the bill, all in the same app.

It might not have the best business index, or the best chat, or the best map, or the best payment manager, but it would be far, far superior to trying to coordinate all of those services through different apps.

And it's not that you need to want all of this, it's that if people around you use it you have enormous pressure to use it as well, because in the previous scenario if you are the guy who doesn't use such app then you have to be catered to specifically through and through, which is annoying for everyone.

If expenditure (hiring) goes up and he's not finding revenue then that's the end sooner rather then later.

it's an interesting vision to be sure, but i'm not sure how buying twitter actually helps it - twitter has already been struggling to expand outside their core product - none of the experiments like moments, spaces, fleets, etc have really taken off. it kind of seems like twitter users just want tweets and nothing else. so now he's taken on a whole bunch of debt to acquire a userbase who is hostile to the app expanding into any other markets? I don't really see a whole lot of evidence that twitter is a good launch platform for an everything-app.

This is probably the biggest risk in this acquisition. Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model. Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.

I have experienced the 'effectiveness' of Twitters moderation team on multiple occasions where they were very ineffective at upholding the very clear cut rules surrounding things like doxxing on their website. I had my personal information made public, and they ignored me. Multiple times. I even created a new account with no way for there to be any publicly available personal info; and yet I was still doxxed somehow, and they still ignored me.

So, in the spirit of HN's rules, I just want to say this, since end user experience should be allowable to share (I hope.).

Effective moderation at twitter is a myth as far as I see it, and their only talent is making it look like they have effective moderation when they care.

P.S. I also was doing nothing wrong in any case where this happened. It was all conversations which should have been considered civil (mostly) and one situation where it had nothing to do with politics or philosophy at all. Yet they did nothing.

Nothing.

And if that makes Elon panic, then we are blessed doubly in that way as well, because he might either actually do something useful to make it a nicer place to be; or he might burn it to the ground.

Both are ideal in my personal opinion.

So axe away I guess, cause there is no wood to chop. The tree is hollow, from all the woodpeckers eating the grubs.

I don't think it's clear this is the case. It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position. Plenty of Twitter clones have been created, yet neither conservatives have migrated to Truth/Parler/Gab/whatever, nor have or will liberals/the anti-Musk contingent to Mastodon, or whatever the left-leaning equivalent Twitter clone coming in the next few weeks is.

Honestly, Twitter's biggest draw to most users is probably the lack of content moderation on something that gets buried beneath the politics and culture discussions: porno, porno, porno. Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part. It's always funny to see a "viral" politics/culture war tweet that has "blown up" with 50k, 100k likes; any given lewd picture of Ganyu from Genshin Impact by a popular artist is going to run double those numbers.

Exactly. Just ask Friendster or MySpace or any of the other failed social networks how deep and wide the network effect moat is in the long run. I'd argue that for all the hype, Twitter was already in the 'long goodbye' phase before Musk bet the farm on it.

> Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part.

And they're completely at the mercy of Google and Apple's policies here. Both of those app stores could put their feet down next week and this 'feature' of Twitter's suddenly becomes a liability.

That's very subjective. "Misinformation" is more moderated than child porn and literal terrorist organizations.

As abhorrent as I may find their ideas, if they play the rules, I'd actually prefer to allow them on the platform.

The eye opener was seeing others cheer on the silencing of academics, politicians,and physicians who's ideas may be out of step with the zeitgeist (or the mob's interpretation of what's apprpos).

Same thing with Libya and Gaddafi, gruesome stuff was done by western backed rebels, including a revival of the black African slave trade and just killing black immigrants in Libya, and all of that is nigh impossible to prove now.

When a video of them throwing a teenage boy into the back of a pickup truck and sawing his head off started making the rounds, their opinion changed completely. Even if they were full of crackpots, these sites documented objectively just how terrible and extremely brutal these wars are.

They were almost ready to fold, got a new iCEO, and completely turned around to become the world’s most valuable company two decades later.

(Fun fact: if Microsoft hadn't sold this $150 million investment in Apple stock, it would be worth $120 BILLION today and this shareholding would be Microsoft's single most profitable business unit.)

Twitter is the product though, there's not an underserved market that they can move into.

The old Twitter was a lost cow looking for pasture and moving very little in fear of getting more lost. For better and worse it had stability. We can assume that stability is now gone through the window.

Some fresh leadership might not be a bad thing for Twitter. Whether Musk is the right person for that...

It's worth keeping in mind that despite the brave face, Musk didn't want to buy Twitter. In fact: he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter. He's been forced to do so by the Delaware courts.

It's more accurate to say Musk didn't want to buy Twitter for $44 billion. His timing on his bid really sucked. He might have saved half or more if he'd waited a few months.

Instead he made a take-it-or-leave-it offer with a ludicrously tight schedule and locked himself into an unfavorable deal without any obvious reason.

I am certain there is a bad decision in there sometimes and I'm wondering what it it might be.

A small part of me thinks that maybe he was uncertain and scared that he would back out so he took that option off the table preemptively.

It's probably more or less the case that for the next several years, it will be difficult for Musk to do any big-ticket M&A, despite having some of the biggest pockets in the business, without agreeing to exceptionally seller-friendly terms. All because of how he handled an acquisition of a flailing media company that it is very unclear that he wanted in the first place.

What I'm saying is that he'll be getting exceptionally seller-friendly terms from everybody, for years to come, because in the course of this supposed "negotiation" he repeatedly breached the terms of the acquisition agreement, publicly slagged the target over and over again, reneged on the deal, and brought a horseshit case to the Delaware Chancery Court to try to avoid performance when the target held him to the deal he agreed to. Every other company is going to notice that (it's one of the most noticeable things to happen in business in 50 years!), and nobody is going to trust him.

I don't believe he did all of that as a negotiating ploy. If he wanted to get the price down, all he had to do was wait before agreeing to an ironclad, overpriced deal. In fact: "waiting" is what he ended up trying to make happen anyways!

This wasn't a negotiating strategy.

He thought he could get away with an "epic troll" for his acolytes to croon over, like the stock price manipulation Tweets. Turns out the Delaware courts have teeth.

Twitter’s management, acting in the best interest of their shareholders, used the court to force him to hold to the contract when he tried to walk. Musk decided to buy the company for the agreed on price rather than have that imposed on him by court order after (more) embarrassing discovery.

Seeing Musk as a business genius in this deal requires ignoring nearly every event in the saga.

anyone who actually think he was forced to pay 43bn when he could have paid 1bn. (even 2bn) are just not thinking correctly.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23201004/twitter-to-sue-el...

Meanwhile, Musk was getting absolutely savaged in the Delaware chancery court and they were just in discovery. He was going to lose and that would be more embarrassing (somehow) than this outcome.

All because he went off half cocked and didn’t write bog standard contingencies into his offer.

He’s come off looking like an absolute simpleton in this and that’s the better outcome for him than if the court case had proceeded.

There was a provision that Musk would be on the hook for $1B if a third party (e.g. regulators) blew up the deal in a couple enumerated ways. No such option was available to Musk himself.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/05/13/elon-musk-cant-just-walk...

It is embedded on this link https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23201004/twitter-to-sue-el...

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522...

“Pay $2B and out” was not a choice available to him.

I haven't had a lot of good things to say about Musk as of late but I think this might be an exception, this kind of fortitude is something we should all strive to have. When cornered, he at least didn't complain or cry too much, he actually bit the bullet and has a very convincingly brave face on indeed.

He decided to buy because he feels its better to own it.

Those sort of breakup fees are to give the company some compensation for non-bad-faith purchasers having external problems, because a failed acquisition is still an expensive thing for a company to have gone through in those situations. A cold-feet buyer throwing shit at the company in public even though he has the means to close the deal? Different story.

He did but not for this price...

I think it's more precise to say he acted as if "he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter.".

If he's unsure about that, he can hire Zuck which might be free from contract soon if we look at how Meta stock is trading.

Obviously many people will disagree with his plan, though I’m 100% certain he has one, and will make it happen.

If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?

That matters personally because you want to set realistic expectations: if you can’t afford to write off a couple of year’s work, launching a startup probably isn’t the best call for you compared to a more staid job which means you don’t need to worry about rent money or health insurance.

It also matters societally because these guys really want to influence our laws, educational system, tax code, etc. and that context is critical. If a billionaire says we should cut taxes on startups to help people climb the ladder, the first question should be how much of the money will go to rich kids from Ivy League schools versus the ones featured in the ad. Similarly, if they’re pushing kids to drop out of college for startups or turning public schools into coding camp, we should be asking how that’ll work out for everyone: the prospects for a kid with affluent high-status parents and a robust social network are quite different from kids who are poor, brown, in the wrong part of the country, etc. and such a policy might be especially dubious if it meant that they have lower negotiating power to get better jobs at the companies run by people making such suggestions.

If you look at software of that era, he wasn't doing something nobody else could do. They had a BASIC interpreter, but it wasn't the first or notably better. MS-DOS certainly worked, but it was at least heavily inspired by CP/M even if the plagiarism accusations were wrong. Being a capable programmer was necessary to his success but it was far from the reason: there were many others around, and they did well but the legendary wealth came to the person whose mother was on IBM's board when he made that company-defining sale. He subsequently executed well but again not uniquely so — anyone who used Microsoft software of that era could tell you that it wasn't the quality of that software which kept people using it. He executed well, and certainly wasn’t shy about an … aggressive … legal strategy but there was also a substantial portion of nepotism and luck.

The world has many people who were smart and hardworking but will never be close to that level of success because they didn’t have the family connections, startups capitol, friends they made at the right school, or the freedom to make a big gamble.

If so, what you're missing is that Gates knew how to play "the game." He knew how to close sales, how to navigate the muddy waters of business, and how to leverage success into more success.

> If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?

My position is that there are multiple factors and neither is sufficient on their own.

I think Bill Gates, Elon Musk are all examples of great success. It doesn't mean they are vastly different from the similar hard working people in their fields. It just means that they did a "little" more combined with lots of other factors that put them where they are.

Lots of stuff is different. I know lots of people with very very wealthy parents. They don't want to run businesses... so they don't. The number of people who have the will and means is probably quite a lot smaller than the people who have the means.

Anyway you've just dodged the question by implying "surely there must be something" but I'm asking what it is. To clarify further, I would consider the marks of a genius to be someone who is either a prodigy (ie: exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience) or who has made significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.

Maybe that's Elon, I don't know.

He wrote and sold a computer game at 12 years old after teaching himself to program at 10.

> significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.

Made eletric cars a viable economic prospect, pioneered reusable rockets. Obviously not making every single technical contribution himself, but leading the process.

I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does.

I literally said I don't follow anything about him and was genuinely asking why people call him a genius. He's obviously a cringy nerd but that's not what I'm looking for.

Anyway I guess the game thing seems somewhat impressive, I'm not sure I'd qualify it as "genius" but that's something.

Business accomplishments are impressive but I don't think they make someone a genius.

Tesla (the company) didn't invent electric cars, but they were the first to make electric cars that people actually wanted to buy.

Pre-Tesla, the public perception of elecric cars was something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA (this did not age well)

They were expensive, small, underpowered, and had poor range. Musk took a weakness (expensive) and turned it into a strength (luxury status symbol) by just embracing that making a high-performance electric car was going to be really expensive and marketing it as a toy for rich people to show off how rich they are. Then, he used the profits from that to scale production and bring down the price for future models.

I don't know if he invented this business strategy, but it's a least a pretty brilliant application of it, along with the admirable goal of reducing fossil fuel emissions by putting more electric cars on the road. He also open-sourced all patents developed by Tesla, so other manufacturers could benefit from whatever they discovered along the way.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.

He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.

He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."

Kevin Watson - chief of avionics at Launcher

Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so.

John Carmack

When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.

Robert Zubrin - Aerospace engineer

This idea that every genius must be formed in a vacuum and can only be considered a “true” one if they can bootstrap themselves from nothing is an absurd idea peddled by underachievers who somehow find solace in their own mediocrity by nullifying the accomplishments of others who don’t fulfil their arbitrary starting conditions.

The meat of the claim is "just an engineer [...] Did he invent something that I'm not aware of?"

The money isn't mentioned to disqualify him, but to point out that money isn't enough.

What did he actually do that shows genius?

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

Elon Musk had no more support than the son of any upper middle class (doctor/pilot/lawyer) household in America would have.

Watching language evolve in real time is fascinating sometimes.

This is where I think his detractors overlook the real benefits he brings. He is fearless and will willingly take long shot bets down roads where others don’t dare tread. His willingness to take the big risk has resulted in some transformative leaps. He’s either very lucky and not very good, or very good and not very lucky, but more likely has a lot of both going for him.

(a) a company trying to build electric cars at a time when there was zero consumer demand for them and the battery technology was nowhere near good enough

(b) a company trying to launch things into space when the vast majority of nations in the world were unable to do so and even NASA seemed like it had lost its way

(c) a popular social media app with 400M users and maybe some issues with product direction

You bet on (a) and (b) because nobody else has pulled it off so if you can do it, you can win big, and you aren't just one of many players in a crowded sea.

(c) is a rough bet since you're already huge but you still have a lot of competition and it's a crowded market and you haven't always made as much money per user as people would like...

I'd definitely be worried about driving advertisers away though. They forced YouTube's hand at least to some degree with the whole adpocalypse thing.

You'd need a lot of market share and confidence as Musk to actually say "this is silly" but it is silly nonetheless. The big players started down the road of "ok we'll ban the worst stuff" and once they blinked it's been "but what about" all the way down.

Good point, but...

The advertiser mostly cares when "everyone" knows they advertise for Nazis. If it's just you who knows, no biggie. They don't want it to be common knowledge.

> The advertiser mostly cares when “everyone” knows they advertise for Nazis.

There are likely some advertisers who would have no qualms about targeting Nazis for advertisements, and little or no qualms about anyone knowing that they do either: criminal lawyers, divorce lawyers, mental health treatment services, drug and alcohol treatment services, certain kinds of charities (such as extremism prevention or anti-racism), etc.

The reason 'xyz' gets banned where xyz is negatively viewed is because it tends to end up everywhere and reduce the utility of the platform.

It's reasonable to moderate content beyond the pale. But that's on the platforms.

Running to advertisers feels like defiantly going to the other parent when you don't receive the answer you want.

I've never drawn the conclusion Bark Box or Toyota stand firmly beyond some crackpot on YT because their ad played before some content.

  The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me,

General Motors just suspended all advertising on Twitter. I've no idea how much their Twitter ad spend compares to that of other companies but certainly GM is not a small company. While I'd love to see it come out that GM doesn't want to be associated with high profile antisemites and conspiracy theorists like Ye, I'd bet it's much more straightforward: GM doesn't want its ad dollars to fund or otherwise be associated with a direct competitor (Tesla).

The problem with a Musk owned Twitter is that there is such a vast range of conflicts of interest. With Musk at the helm it's just that much harder for a company facing social/political pressure to justify doing business with Twitter.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-28/gm-tempor...

Any company trying to claim this now should justify why they had no problem advertising on Twitter while Iran and Al Qaeda had official Twitter accounts

Those implementations will be defeated by motivated adversaries and they will not have the expertise remaining to rebuild it. There will be many lessons learned again at great cost.

Non-motivated non-adversaries already defeat these systems by accident, which I assume are mostly based on user-reports. But I assume Germany's regulators are satisfied enough with Twitter's implementation, since I haven't heard about any issues with in.

He now has the network to connect those people directly to the rest of the world, under his umbrella. Sure, he could have just used (old) Twitter's API, and that's what he'll be using, but it won't be "we (as in 'Neuralink') and Twitter made this happen", but "we (my companies)" made this happen.

I also wonder how useful Twitter's infrastructure could be for machine-to-machine communication, where he certainly could have some uses for it with Tesla and Starlink.

If I'd had made this acquisition, specially in the circumstances he did it, I'd probably get so depressed that I'd put and end to it all.

I'm not a fanboy, but I'm also not a hater.

Is that supposed to be an attempt at imagining the most horrible future possible?

Umbrella corporation anyone?

In the same vein, the influx of new users who had avoided Twitter due to its censorious, hostile community norms.

>Search right now for any insulting, racist, negationist trope and you'll find tons of tweets.

Sounds like the hostile community I'm describing, which turns a lot of people off from Twitter!

In 2020 twitter had a net loss of $1.14B. The loans will kill twitter.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...

We could drill down further here but it’s not worth 3 paragraphs of nuance for this subtle point.

There’s also operating leverage. This business should trend to 50-80% gross margins and 30-50% profit / free cash flow conversion, similar to Facebook, Google, or other similar businesses.

Further, there’s a bunch of pre- and post- transaction adjustments that hit the financial statements (for example stock based compensation will likely go away in a private company, thus raising profitability), so you can’t just take last years profit and tack on the new debt structure.

Last, the amortization on high yield isn’t necessarily linear. In the most extreme example (where the debt costs >12%) you could have pay-in-kind (PIK) interest where the interest payments accrue to the balance of the loan (like a credit card) and for amortization, it could be anywhere from straight line (1/x periods) to a “bullet” with no amortization at all until a end period where it all comes due at once (you typically refinance in that case).

All-in, it may be risky, but the bankers that committed billions of capital to the deal aren’t exactly brain dead and all have internal credit approval processes which require them to do all the work outlined above and a bunch more.

I don't know why you dissed my response, then gave an answer that basically supports it.

But sure, you’re smarter than them all combined, they’re wrong and underwrote a faulty deal and you’re right, particularly when having no info on the post transaction capital structure.

They're paying out vests on the sales price in cash, which was higher than the value of the company. Normally equity comp places the price fluctuation risk on the employee, but in this case, they're directly eating this cost.

If they don't offer salaries that are competitive with other companies total comp, they will bleed employees, and won't be able to hire talented engineers.

So, no, this really doesn't help, and if anything it increases their direct costs.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/10/07/767805936/houston-rockets-gm-...

You spout wrongthink in a twitter DM, and now your bank, credit card, email, private messages, facebook, rail pass, amazon, uber, government ID, school accounts, craigslist and tinder are permabanned.

First of all this idea of a superapp is nothing new. In fact iOS or Android is also a "superapp". Basically a software that has an ecosystem inside of it. Wechat has just created their own ecosystem within a ecosystem, because they want to control everything.

Second, when compared to most other Chinese apps I do have to admit that wechat is much more finished, but when compared to other global messaging apps like Telegram, Slack etc. I'd say wechat is about 10-15 years behind in everything and lacking the most fundamental features. The social media aspect of wechat which is called "Wechat Moments" is also extremely limited: Basically like Instagram without you being able to see or follow people you don't know personally. If your friend posts a photo and his friend (who you don't know) makes a comment on it, you cannot see this comment but you can see your friends replies to him/her. Yes, super confusing. Also no images, videos, gifs in the comments etc.

Third, a lot of people like to mention that "you can do everything with wechat". You can do a lot of things, but I don't know anyone who only uses wechat. There are a lot of other apps that you need to live comfortably: Alipay (this is another superapp), Taobao (like ebay), Jingdong (like amazon), Dianping (like Yelp) etc.

Wechat does have it's internal "miniprogram" system (alternative to native apps) where you can have some of these apps I previously mentioned, but there are severe app size, memory and performance limitations, proprietary API and the performance and functionality is from early 2010s internet. Laggy and slowly opening pages, collapsing and bouncy layouts etc. Also wechat does not support multitasking: When you are using for example Tim Horton's miniprogram to order coffee, you can't chat with your friends, you can't open a Starbucks/some_other_coffee_company miniprogram on the side and compare prices. You have to close and kill the current "app" and then open a new "app" for new action. This is somewhat understandable due to the iOS/Android limitations of a single app (in regards to performance and memory), but it highlights why this kind of a "superapp" idea is fundamentally flawed.

So basically IMO "superapp" is a solution looking for a problem. We already have iOS, Android or web browser. We don't need another forced ecosystem but we need good apps for existing ones.

Is that a technical shortcoming or business logic? It doesn't sound entirely different from how Twitter handles private/blocked accounts.

Where are people gonna go if not on Twitter? The left isn't gonna have better luck with their own truth social or parler. The network effect is too big with Twitter. It's not fun if you're not dunking on your enemies. That's the fun of Twitter.

I think you may be over-estimating how much most people "need" something like Twitter. For the vast majority of users, a news feed and private messaging (WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) are good enough.

My guess is that the percent of people who use social media will decrease by half over the coming decade, at least in the US and Europe.

That would require Facebook to make a shrewd business decision though so never mind.

I wonder if he needs to do this.

Maybe I've just been working for tech companies in the Bay Area too long. But I don't want to work for a company where I don't have equity that I can cash out.

And now all those engineers are working for a company where equity doesn't exist? An exception could be a Netflix model where you make a buttload of money. But Twitter isn't that.

You guys are really thinking Musk is some bozos that have never done anything in his life. Its quite incredible. Last week 4 astronauts went to ISS on his rocket and the first stage landed, again. Tesla is still growing at close to 40/50% top and bottomline when all car companies are contracting, even FAANG.

Twitter is yet to be seen. But its quite incredible the dismissiveness around here. Making Twitter work is peanuts comparing to trying to get a car company and a space company (both industries where successful examples are much harder to find than social media companies. Even if we point fingers as Meta and Snap, they are profitable and not bankrupt like most car and space companies in history) to survive through the 2008 Financial crisis.

people arent going to take pay cuts to serve lists of shitposts and ads

I'm no Musk hater and interested to see where he takes Twitter. That said, SpaceX is at the forefront of space travel, and they want to put man on Mars. Twitter sells advertisements on the internet, with the lofty goal of selling some more ads.

Why? Elon is not the guy who gonna do it.

He wants freedom of speench under his control.

Tesla for instance is very much anti open source.

IT IS ORDERED that respondent... establish and implement, and thereafter maintain, a comprehensive information security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of nonpublic consumer information.

Making sure all private data goes in the vault and the vault is secure shouldn't take more than 1% of an organization the size of Twitter. Even if they're doing it poorly, it shouldn't be more than 10%.

If it really is 5x (> 80% of their engineering budget), I guarantee you they are in violation of the consent decree -- there is no way to vet that many engineers or audit their work!

Any security architecture that requires every single engineer has to do everything exactly right 100% of the time is bound to fail. The order to put in reasonable privacy protections doesn't say "and do it in the most expensive, error prone fashion possible".

What they want is additional work, and technical implementation that the agreements are being enforced in code. It’s a fascinating area for a career, but the tools are not well developed and engineers not trained to code this way. Ends up being like a 40% tax on a lot of peoples work, plus the people who write and operate the verification systems.

It’s probably what the security field should have done years ago, but there were never as expensive of fines as for privacy violations.

Not exactly onerous since they were a public company before.

If you owe the bank 200,000$ and can't pay it, you are in trouble.

If you owe the bank 1.2 billion dollars and can't pay it, THE BANK is in trouble.

This very very very much applies here.

Oh, please tell me more about this great exodus of you and all your friends leaving twitter and moving on to "truth social for pro-censorshippers where only cool kids who left the sucky playground where they used to be able to bully everyone out they didn't like but no longer can't so they left for this better playground where only other cool people who don't disagree with you or your friends are allowed in" instead.

You and your friends aren't kicked out. You don't have to leave.

If anything, you're gonna want to be there to call out Trump on his BS, just like all the "uncool" people want to be there to call Biden out on his BS.

Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there…

The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting.

It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here.

For everything there is a season.

> Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way. Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there…

> The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting.

> It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here.

> For everything there is a season.

What you sound like:

Yes and there shall be an exodus from the Twitters.

The parents shall come in, then the grandparents shall follow. Once those generations arrive the decline shall start. Not before. Not long after. But right after the grandparents, whence they arrive.

The polarization shall induce the decline. This wrought on by the older generations. And this is when the majority shall flock to sites for information and escapism.

Just as Slashdot, and Digg, declined before it, so shall the Twitters decline as well.

For everything, there is a season.

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With your prescience, you must be a billionaire. Why don't you just buy Twitter off of Elon?

But the parents are already there. Like, uh, me. And most of my Twitter friends are similarly aged. And some of their parents are there. My mute list grows every couple months. I don’t mind political content but get tired of being battered by angry repetitive posts. Most of the people I know who abandoned facebook did it for that reason.

The younger folks I know don’t have an account or care. I don’t even know what the cool thing is anymore. That’s probably the point.

It’s already in its decline, the user numbers maybe don’t reflect it yet. And it’s not prescient any more than watching any historical trend repeat itself is.

There’s more than a billion reasons I’m not a billionaire, including. I’m not brave, smart, or initially wealthy enough are a few.

If I were, I wouldn’t buy a social media site. I also wouldn’t buy a TCBY franchise. These are things that might be great short term, but risk increases over time. A 1-2 year old TCBY is packed with kids. A 5+ year old one looks like every near empty ice cream shop. They all have the same smell, it’s weird.

Anyway, I’m risk adverse… and that lack of bravery is partly why I’m not wealthy in any sense.

I might be wrong about all of this. Just applying what I’ve seen from the past to the present.

So, discriminatory, ageist, prejudicial comments are allowed on HN now? Or only if it's against "older folks", I see.

It’s not a statement that all or even most older people do it. I anecdotally see it more from older demographics. I might be wrong. I probably am tiptoeing the line of “ist” there. Definitely don’t mean to say all or most older people, but I am generalizing on a demographic. I’ll have to think about that more.

I don’t think statements like that should be “disallowed” anywhere except places like employment, etc. And it’s never OK to say that a generalization applies to an individual because they are within a demographic.

I think if Musk pulls off what he’s trying to, it’ll be better than now. I block and mute Trump, Biden, etc. anyway. When I want to get politics I reach out for it in a format >280 characters.

I don’t idolize or demonize Musk. He’s just another person with talents and flaws like the rest of us. He does some smart stuff. He does some head scratching things. He likes attention, can be hilarious, clever, or, as my kids say, “cringey.” But I don’t want him to be anything other than he wants to. We need all of that in the world.

This is more a statement that Musk isn’t going to ruin Twitter. I think it will follow the same historical curve as all social media and it has 0 to do with him. And pre social media things as well, since at least WWII. “The kids” set trends. By the time the majority latches on, they’ve moved on. Heck, you can probably see that in slang’s impact on “proper” language much longer.

I’ll be happy if/when “epic” leaves slang. For some reason that one irritates my pedantry more than any other.

I can't imagine how dysfunctional twitter would be with %75 of staff gone, I don't even know if it will continue running as a business after that.

Whatever the actual figure is, it is unlikely to be the same figure across all departments - likely some departments will be cut much more than others. Probably engineering will experience significantly less cuts than marketing, PR, HR, government relations, business development, etc. Even in engineering, some cuts may be due to things like adjusting the manager:IC ratio.

It didn’t work, and I doubt he’ll follow through on it. Otherwise, it’s sure to freeze almost all future initiatives and turn the team into caretakers instead of innovators and I’m not sure what the point of that would be.

Just look at their Web UI, horribly slow and lagy.

Twitter is horribly bloated and unprofitable company. Several thousands people could be justified if there are sales and profits. 75% is not enough, current people must go, regardless of politics.

If he ever did say it, it was allegedly said to other investors in a private setting. More than likely it's a fabrication by someone who hates Elon (as unlikely as that sounds) laundered into the media as from an anonymous source.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586108809772089345?s=46...

Edit: apparently this was “trauma / shock actors” (whatever that means) but it was still picked up by CNBC.

And the zeitgeist seems to have changed lately - so jobs may not be so easier to come by, especially for employees that may be too political for the employer.

Twitter will function better with 75% of the staff gone.

I tried getting a solar system from Tesla, and it convinced me not to consider their cars. I know it is a different side of the company, but I ended up with a used electric BMW. I was resigned to dealing with the B-hole stigma around having a beamer, but whatever. It's a nice car, environmentally friendly, and was inexpensive.

That's not what happened. Instead, Tesla owners say things like "I got the Tesla before Musk went nutso roll eyes, and it's actually pretty good, but I'm not sure I'd buy another one..."

I'm surprised how quickly the Teslas went from being a status symbol to a faux pas around here. Maybe it's a different story in less liberal areas.

However, unless I'm missing something, social signaling / image management is way more important to the Twitteratti than people buying commuter cars / kid taxis.

(Again, whatever. It's a car, not a political statement, but I've seen more than one Tesla owner apologize for owning one.)

"Our next car will be electric... But not a Tesla."

I hear that all the time now. My wife, who recently turned 30, would be mortified for her friends to see her in a Tesla. They associate the brand with a creepy, slimy billionaire and a legion of tech bro sycophants.