I think first party ads promoting commerce on your platform can be very lucrative. And % of transactions tend not to be, with the exception of Android / iOS app store markets.
I haven't done the math because nobody is paying me to. But your example of Amazon might reinforce my point in that all three components (retail, ads, AWS) reinforce each other. Amazon is trying to be the "Everything App" also because they see synergies (even if only in shared infra).
And Amazon can afford to be less agressive with ads because it's a smaller part of their business, compared to (e.g.) Meta or Twitter. Apple is in a similar place: they can afford to care more about privacy because they don't make money from ads.
The more revenue Twitter can get from non-ad sources, the better the user experience (in my opinion).
But you're right that there's no guarantee that they will be able to get much non-ad revenue.
Yeah I think he's going to intensely focus on Twitter for ~6 months, not change much, get bored, and then move onto something else.
I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from given he demonstrated ability to stick with a business in the toughest of times.
Tesla was literally days away from bankruptcy at one time and Musk made it work.
After first 3 failed launches he was about to run out of money and yet he financed another launch, which worked.
He hasn't had a business failure yet.
Is that a guy who gets bored and moves on to something else?
Though he's the CEO of SpaceX, it's really run by Gwynne Shotwell.
You look at his wikipedia, and there's like 10 different things he's currently involved with, so yes, he looks like a guy that gets bored and moves on the other things.
I expect creating tunnels 20 years from now as important as right now.
Traffic jams are not going away magically, but automation can bring the cost of creating tunnels down, which can increase the total market significantly.
Time is helping the company (just like other projects Elon has started), so there's no rush to scale up and turn profit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9th_and_12th_Street_Expressway...
> Motorways and bypasses generate traffic, that is, produce extra traffic, partly by inducing people to travel who would not otherwise have done so by making the new route more convenient than the old, partly by people who go out of their direct route to enjoy the greater convenience of the new road, and partly by people who use the towns bypassed because they are more convenient for shopping and visits when through traffic has been removed
These photos illustrate it well:
https://www.streetroots.org/news/2015/04/03/streets-are-ever...
e-bikes should be banned. Cyclists are the worst. You get far more bad cyclists than you do bad drivers. When living in Australia 12 years ago, i almost got knocked over by cyclists over a dozen times when they run red lights, refuse to slow down.
At one point they were rebuilding the side-walk and so the workers coned off the bike path to let people walk for a week while the pavement work happened, in 1 week that it was closed off I saw cyclists verbally abuse people, myself included, for walking on a cycle way that was blocked off to cyclists and the workmen were tellign them to cycle on the road.
~600 deaths 35,000 hospitalisation due to car accidents.
~85 deaths 13,000 hospitalisation due to cycling accidents.
But in any case when walking in the city I feel safe walking with cars. But I don’t feel safe with cyclists. They rush through red lights. Rush through intersections while people are crossing. I’ve witnessed accidents occur due to cyclists not following the laws. If they followed the laws and slowed down. Stopped and gave way like they are meant to. I wouldn’t have an issue.
Why didn't the workers cone off a lane from the street to make space for the bikes? Cars usually have easier alternatives, they can just take another lane.
EDIT: But anyway, the real viable alternative to cars is probably not bikes, it's trains and buses.
Living in asia I love having MRTs.
Pretty easy to get rid of traffic jams actually, you just get rid of the cars. Never been stuck in traffic in places where there aren't cars.
If you’re going to have a 4 lane road reserve two of the lanes for super high capacity vehicles (busses).
Traffic jams are a byproduct of the limits of physics. Once you reach a certain density it is simply impossible to provide enough private car parking and lane capacity.
What makes you believe this? And that Musk was responsible for it?
So, the LVCC was built at 0.54 km/month, while the Channel tunnel was buildlt at 0.7 km/month.
Which part is false?
However, if we look at freight+people crossing the tunnels, the Channel tunnel surely wins again - it may be roughly 10 times more expensive per km, but it carries orders of magnitudes more, by rail + by car.
Twitter is fundamentally trying to solve a people problem, which is much fuzzier. Every impression I've had from "public Elon" is that he is absolutely wretched at people-problems-at-scale. I'm also not sure there is any human ever who has been able to solve people problems at Twitter's scale.
keynesianism eventually failed because corporations and large capital holders will not act rationally towards the whole when they have interests that benefit themselves. so I suppose you’re right. but that doesn’t change the fact that for a good 30 years his ideas and solutions made life better for a huge number of people
For all practical purposes, doesn't Shotwell run SpaceX and Elon just shows up to give "input", whenever the capital raise du-jour is necessary, and to do the marketing and PR?
It does seem to me he will need another Shotwell for either Tesla or Twitter, though. You can be CEO of as many companies as you want, but if the CEO is also doing the Operations part of the work, then you're constrained to pretty much one company at a time. I wonder if we'll see Jack come back to Twitter.
No.
I don't feel like Musk has really changed, he's always been a bit nuts. He just has a bigger reach now.
Hard stuff takes time. People with no patience and perseverance never gets big stuff done. Musk is not the same.
Basically Musk said that he was just insulting him in a general sense and that the man was not a pedophile
His behavior like… every day and the fact that he apparently accidentally just bought a $44B company doesn’t at least let you see where people are coming from?
The same guy who tweeted "Funding secured". His tweets about starting boring company, and buying twitter. His email exchanges that are now public. He is VERY impulsive and erratic (maybe not hotheaded).
All his tweets on Bitcoin:
https://www.rockwelltrading.com/articles/coffee-with-markus/...
I don't know why people say this when stuff goes wrong for him all the time. He literally just failed to get out of this Twitter deal.
He hasn't given up on self-driving after it turned out to be much harder than he thought. He's still pouring money and time into it.
And he hasn't given up on Starlink, even though it is not nearly as profitable as he hoped originally. He's just launching more satellites.
And he hasn't given up on Starship even though it is years late. He's doubling down on its development.
But I conceded that he might not see Twitter as critical for his ultimate goals. Maybe he'll just sell it to a bigger fool in a few years?
SpaceX also beat Boeing with a smaller budget (NASA gave more to Boeing) in sending astronauts to the ISS. Boeing still is not able to get a successful test launch 2 years after SpaceX got the first astronauts to ISS from US domestic soil.
Then there's Tesla, where the Model Y, despite being double the price of a Corolla, outsold the Corolla - https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/10/tesla-model-y-passing-...
If you can stumble into so many achievements by luck. Or just by oh, lean on a few Shotwells and engineers.... then why are companies like Meta and Snap etc in the trash bin? Why is Boeing still stuck on the ground? Why after a half a decade of Tesla killers than nobody is getting killed but legacy automakers (all declining revenue and deliveries).
> https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-snake-charger-elon-musk/
> https://insideevs.com/news/326869/elon-musk-comments-on-fail...
The latter he said was due to low uptake (which is nonsense - you can find YouTube videos of how unfindable the place is).
> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1017149641991680002
More stuff he has given up on.
Musk's time is valuable given that he's leading a lot of companies. He's not going to sit around and mull over twitter. The best thing he can do is spend time => chart a plan => hire a capable CEO who is best at execution (Tim Cook for instance). If he spends more time on twitter, his other bets will get hurt disproportionately.
It’s politics, politics, politics. From all angles and perspectives, in the possibly most annoying way. You have to make so many politics and policy decisions that all have many up- and downsides and that are just plain hard to make.
From a technology perspective Twitter is not at all interesting and the rest is just plain annoying. Plus, it’s a small social network, mostly relevant because important people (imagine myself rolling my eyes here) are on it. So doing other social media stuff that rely on network effects? (Messenger, payment, ...) Not really realistic. Not because the technology is infeasible. None of this is a technological challenge. It’s just politics and network effects.
so, WeChat?
WeChat in China, LINE in Japan, Gojek in Indonesia... A lot of those platforms are crazy profitable
You can do that right now by turning off retweets for the people you follow. You have to do that individually for every user you follow but it allows for a highly curated timeline. I turn of retweets for about 80% of the people I follow because I am interested in their original content but not in their random retweets. The other 20% introduce me to new content through their retweets.
so, AOL?
They just need his guidance and leads, PMs, design, engineers, … and, most importantly, users of these existing platforms will all align and populate this brave new super app.
1. Musk is going to discover (and maybe admit?) that fixing Twitter is harder than he thought. It will be just like self-driving, which seems straightforward, but which actually has thousands of edge cases which are hard to solve with a single general system. Nevertheless, he will persist, because that's what he does.
2. Current Twitter makes a profit on advertising, which means Twitter needs to encourage high levels of engagement, which means they need controversial (emotional) content, but not so emotional (toxic) as to drive people away. They need to be as close to the line as possible, which is why they spend so much effort on moderation. Musk's solution is, I predict, to try different revenue sources so that engagement with the feed is not the primary metric.
3. Musk has already stated that his goal is the Everything App (which he calls X). The Everything App has news, social media, games, videos, and a payment infrastructure (both to pay for content and to get paid). He wants Twitter to replace Facebook, Instagram, Google News, YouTube, Twitch and PayPal, etc. Will he be able to pull it off? I expect he will deliver the 20% of those services that are high-value, but pitch it as a complete solution. That might actually be good enough for most people.
4. If he accomplishes #3, then the revenue source is obviously: they will take a cut out of every transaction going on in the network. Maybe ads are a component, but they don't have to be a major component. If engagement is no longer the most important metric, then it's possible to allow every person to have a radically personalized feed. Even something as simple as only showing you tweets from people you follow (what a concept!) would revolutionize the experience and drastically reduce the need for moderation.
5. Since Twitter is private, Musk can front-load #4 even before the Everything App is ready. If he hasn't already burned the current team, he can make the experience better relatively quickly and worry about profit later.
6. Now for my safest prediction: No matter what he does, some people will hate him for it.