On the other hand, I think Twitter has so much momentum, it will take a lot of time to implode if Musk makes (even a lot of) mistakes.
I'll bite on this one. For reference, I personally believe Elon Musk is a degenerate blowhard who has literally zero concept of what life actually is like for billions of people on the planet, nor does he care. I believe he belongs to the class of people known as 'parasites'. Here's my take:
1 year: Initially, we'll see improvements. Dead weight is cut, along with some live branches, but we see improvements. More free and open speech, I believe he will follow through on that. Fringe groups have a louder voice and can find people to join their causes, leading to further polarization of politics across the globe, and especially in the US.
3 Years: Quality and use is declining as celebrities and politicians have begun to move away from Twitter due to constant abuse from toxic individuals, up to and including "vague" threats of violence. A minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them.
5 Years: Twitter is dead. There was a political assassination that was formed, planned, and tweeted/broadcast from Twitter live. This may be a state level politician or federal, but it will be someone many people know the name of. Elon Musk blames the engineers for not properly implementing his AI software intended to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
I'm no expert in Twitter, but I have heard many people of note complain about receiving death threats on Twitter. One example:
https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dea...
> Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed that some mornings she starts her day by reading the death threats she has received from men on Twitter.
Making a death threat, or a threat of violence, is not protected speech, it is a crime. Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform?
Also, if it was already happening (up to and including "minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them"), is this the trajectory you see regardless of ownership? And if not how will new ownership contribute to it?
If Twitter, under the previous leadership was full of death threats to leftists, and the new leadership is promising less moderation actions taken against the sort of people who make those threats, it seems reasonable to assume that those threats will continue or get worse
Less moderation to the point of not taking actions against content which is criminal, i.e. threatening violence?
> new leadership is promising less moderation actions taken against the sort of people who make those threats
I think there is some leap in logic here, which is that conservatives are more likely to be criminals, but if that holds then banning them from the platform for non criminal offences will reduce the amount of criminals on the platform, however you will also be banning people who are not criminals in the process, and this does not really seem like a terribly morally sound thing to be doing. How many steps from banning people from twitter for conservative views to reduce crime to jailing people who frequent bars because they are more likely to be criminals? If your only value is to reduce crime, then I'm not sure I see where the breaks are.
Yes, obviously. Because Musk sure isn't pushing for more of this oversight.
The correlation runs the other way. Mass shooters and people who carry out acts of political violence in the US are overwhelmingly driven by conspiracy "logic" that has recently been embraced by the right; Qanon, pizza parlor conspiracies, racism, etc.
Because, put plainly: I don't think there's much reason to expect Musk to take them seriously.The previous management had only minimal capability to curb this behavior, or claimed they did, because of scale. They'd deal with cases that rose to the top, but not a lot more. Musk, on the other hand, is ideologically congruent with much of it, and there are no indications that his yelling about "free speech, especially for the right wing" comes with consequences or even minor disapproval for that speech when you use it to threaten to kill somebody.
Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think so, though.
Absence of indication is not indication of absence though.
Another way to look at it that by having less strict moderation, and keeping moderation mainly focused on unprotected speech such as incitement or threats, you have more resources to go after unprotected speech.
> Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think so, though.
Fair enough.
>Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform?
The old owners only did what they had to when the threats floated to the surface of the lagoon. The new owner has explicitly said that free speech means free speech. I believe overt threats of violence (read: I will kill X on June 5, 2023) will be addressed, but anything that can be played off as "satire" or "joking" (Read: somebody should kill X. lol jk) will be ignored, if not promoted for the extra eyes and clicks.
>is this the trajectory you see regardless of ownership?
No. I believe with old ownership we would see what we currently have in perpetuity. There was no innovation from Twitter, but there was also no real negative change either. Status quo.
>And if not how will new ownership contribute to it?
From what I read/see, Elon Musk espouses the view that people who disagree with him are lesser than. I believe he genuinely thinks he is better than everyone else; smarter, stronger, faster, better. I believe he will see people who act and think the same way (read: toxic) on Twitter, and automatically defend them if not outright promote them. This group will include people who incite violence.
The internet has existed for decades with laxer moderation and nothing like this has happened - seems like you're making some hidden assumptions about how the political climate will evolve that are pretty questionable.
Twitter has no real impact on polarization on politics especially in the US. The problems of the US are first past the post elections, the broken 19th century style primaries, people literally not having enough money to take a day off to vote and/or being too burnt out daily to give a shit about politics.
The result is the extremes get a very very loud voice since they are the only ones with nothing better to do. Twitter suddenly being more "free and open" means the extremes get an even louder voice.
Your average person making up most of the population just wants to kick back and relax from the daily grind. Not go argue on twitter.
The toxic threats even sometimes come from twitter staff and insiders, for example when Coinbase announced their no-politics-at-work policy, Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo tweeted in reply that that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong would be "lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary".
The fish rots from the head.
Myspace still exists in some form.
Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he is good at min-maxing, but I don't know that Twitter has a great competitive advantage to build on. It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter. The biggest thing Elon would have to do is build trust with users and partner companies and that certainly does not seem like the direction he's heading. On the one hand I wouldn't bet against Elon, on the other hand the deck seems stacked against him. He'll have to prove he can run a SASS Twitter with minimal staff, which may be possible. But I don't know he does that and goes into al these other areas (payments, advertising, trust and safety) that seem very hands on to build relationships with partner companies, PCI Compliance, handle customer concerns, fraud etc.
Managing people requires people. He wants to make the moderation process more transparent? He'll either have to invent perfect text analysis AI, or he'll need people to process and respond to abuse complaints and petitions.
This TC article sums up the X challenges pretty well: https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/08/elon-musk-x-everything-wec...
Not sure what problem a cryptocurrency would solve in this case.
Can you imagine someone as volatile and vain as Elon Musk having your porn viewing history? There's a good reason why most sex entrepreneurs stay off the radar.
I personally can't wait for him to kinkshame a Twitter influencer who makes him mildly upset.
And can Musk and others staff up in China (if US and Chinese politics/government allows it)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system#ByteDa...
I think you'd have to provide a lot more research to "996 (72hr weeks) apparently works in China". What type of companies, what type of jobs, ubiquity etc.
In order to make 996 work in the US, there would need to be a pretty big oversupply of talent (and a lower standard of living) to make people desperate enough to give up their entire lives to their work. Unfortunately, I think we may be getting close to that about now or at least heading down that path.
Just as an example: both Facebook and Snapchat (and I'm sure others) have tried adding games to their platform. Both efforts have failed because you can get a better gaming experience by playing a standalone game. If you want to play with a friend, you can message them and say "hey, let's play X." There is limited upside to playing in Facebook or Snapchat, and a lot of downsides (limited catalog, performance restrictions, etc.)
One exception to this is any feature that requires exposure to an audience. Social media is very good at exposing people to content. Something like Facebook marketplace can be successful because sellers want their listings to be seen by people and buyers want to go to places that have the most sellers.
Considering the leadership culture that grew twitter to nearly ten thousand, for Twitter, I don't think "dozens" was anywhere near feasible. I suppose it depends on your definition of "product".
The Chinese internet is heavily restricted and censored and regulated by their government. It simply cannot be used as a model in the west. Technology progresses in cycles, and the Chinese and American internet cycles don’t line up. Eg China uses QR codes for payment everywhere because they cycled off cash while the US largely missed that train, but has near universal credit cards and NFC availability. Americans would never pay at a cash register through QR codes.
Android and IOS are great at providing a moldable surface for apps. A super app aggregates censorship to one entity, which isn’t a market force in the west. The “chat bot” style super apps also didn’t take off in the west because our technology is more expensive. We’re richer so we have, on average, higher end devices that can render more AND we can pay to build more feature rich native apps. We aggregate app data at the operating system level (notification center, Google home app, Siri, Uber integration into native mapping app, etc). China can’t because most of android is created in America, and they’d essentially have to hard-fork it to build changes their way (again those changes largely include censorship choke points)
He'll either be the GOAT or the goat, but the gamble is clearly on the table, and Musk being Mush will declare victory before the dice even start to roll.
Unfortunately, eventually you need more than hype before the public and regulators come for you because you haven’t delivered.
And musk hasn’t delivered.
Being the elites' gathering place is indeed its biggest advantage, and the fact that consumers can get public visibility on issues they're facing helps companies with their public image. There are many times where I or friends have posted about issues after exhausting the standard support channels, and quickly cut through the bureaucratic red tape and got our problem solved. I think that's a monetizable angle.
I think something similar would apply to other elites as well. Politicians can get direct feedback from constituents, music artists get direct feedback from fans (see the recent Lizzo "spaz" thing), and so on. However, in the current climate, elites are getting skewed feedback, so "more free speech" could actually help, if it's done right.
Besides the fact that "more free speech" seems to involve making fun of trans people and bringing back donald trump, which do not correlate with more accurate feedback to elites.
Twitter was on its death bed until Trump signed on and became the shit-posting President. This is not an endorsement of Trump or bringing him back, but the type of "free speech" people are talking about saved Twitter, made it a pile of money, and made other media/press companies billions of dollars covering the chaos.
https://www.zippia.com/twitter-careers-11916/revenue/
It seems like Growth was actually lowest during Trump's presidency.
I think this is failing to imagine how bad things could get societally. Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start enjoying consuming and being associated with malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech.
Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and hateful people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.
Yes, that would mean a majority of people would have to adopt those perspectives - to the detriment of society at large - but it's happened before in many parts of the world, and could happen again. That is a long-term goal of fascists anyways - to re-normalize that kind of thing, and to re-combine industry and media with a religious ethnostate.
At the very least, the previously quiet pre-existing enjoyment of malevolent speech has been exposed for all to see over the last several years. The question is whether it has a growing audience.
I'm not saying that's Elon's goal, but accelerationism seems to be something he is aligned with as long as it doesn't come at a cost to him.
If you start with the proposition "Anyone should be able to post anything on Twitter"...
... and want to get to "Everyone enjoys reading Twitter," then there's a lot of black box space in the middle.
You can have the most vile things on your platform, but your userbase self-censors. E.g. crowdsourced shadow-banning / down-voting. Or reputation with verified identities underneath.
Or just... more transparency.
Empowering the public to data-mine Twitter opens some interesting windows to a platform that has terrible things, but empowers interested parties to fruitfully research who they're coming from.
Incidentally, in the US at least, the idea of “free speech” is now firmly associated with the far right conservatives.
The latest impression is driven by conservatives' messaging that "big tech" is censoring them, coupled with their belief that tech mores used to calibrate that censorship are coastal (and therefore more liberal).
Ergo, free speech is their right to say conservative things.
In the 60s and 80s and 00s, it was liberal. Give it another few years to swing back.
It's not a "messaging", it's an observable fact. Look at political leanings and donations for Twitter or Facebook workers. Over 80% goes to the left. And that's before we consider that the power is not distributed equally there and if you look at the people in power it's more like 100% to the left.
> Ergo, free speech is conservatives' right to say conservative things.
That's a completely wrong conclusion. Free speech is everybody's right to say their things, but conservative's rights are infringed much more frequently, so they complain more.
You have that backwards.
White supremacist rallies have labeled themselves as "free speech" rallies in an attempt to normalize their cause.
However, exercising one's free speech rights by rallying for a cause does not automatically make that cause synonymous with supporting "free speech".
Free speech as in the first amendment is pretty universal.
Free speech as in Twitter bans and complaining about cancel culture is largely the far right.
It’s hardly the far right. People from all 3 political groups are scared of cancel culture. Painting this as far right serves only to label anybody that cares about such things as far right. You’re attempting to shut the conversation down. This is part of the problem and is literally misinformation that could cause violence against those labeled “far right” in the future.
> could cause violence against those labeled “far right” in the future.
That’s quite the scaremongering there, hyperbole does not move the dialog forward.
Oh but it is, why else would you label people that care about such things as extremists?
> That’s quite the scaremongering there, hyperbole does not move the dialog forward.
No it serves to make you aware of the danger of your speech.
> Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and hateful people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.
I may be sidetracking the conversation here, but I must admit I find it fascinating how “hatefulness” online is almost always assumed to be right-wing extremism.
Have everyone forgotten the BLM and Antifa riots going on for months where innocent people had their property, livelihood and in some cases even their lives taken?
That was fully encouraged and endorsed by the left, en masse, and especially so on Twitter.
Was that not “hate”? If not, what is?
I realize it's not HN-appropriate, but once in a while I break down and make fun of those who see no difference between oppression and fighting against the oppression.
Ofcourse the people burning the city down and looting think they are doing the right thing, or at least doing it for the right reasons. Ofcourse the black people "taking the streets back" feel entitled to it, after whatever backstory there was.
But during the Antifa and BLM riots, actual businesses, owned by innocents bystanders got ruined. Innocent people got murdered. There were real tragedies to real people, mostly white.
When that gets cheered on at social media-sites like twitter (or live on CNN!), it's hard to frame it as anything except hate against white people.
Maybe they thought they were fighting oppression. But at the same time they were oppressing. They became what they claimed to fight.
Who are to say they are better than the people they claimed to be fighting, which didn't burn down cities, didn't kill innocent civilians?
The ends does not justify the means. Not in a lawful society at least. These were hateful acts. EOT.
George Floyd’s killer was found guilty and sentenced. Does that mean nothing?
Breonna Taylor was with someone that shot at police. It’s unfortunate what happened but perhaps one shouldn’t associate with people doing such things if they want to avoid these situations.
Sure, which cities did they burn down? The person I replied to made a specific claim I was asking about. You don't seem to be able to list them, either, despite them being all over the news.
>George Floyd’s killer was found guilty and sentenced... Breonna Taylor was with someone that shot at police.
And? The comment I was replying to said that the people BLM claimed to be fighting hadn't killed any innocent people. What was George Floyd's killer convicted for then? What did Breonna Taylor do that left her guilty?
I understand that situations are more complicated than what they end up reduced down to. But op made specific, false claims.
Is it conceivable that perhaps the statement employed hyperbole to make a point and was not literal?
Your hairsplitting between "burning cities down" and arson misses the point completely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_arson_damage_during_th...
https://www.yahoo.com/video/rioters-set-fire-federal-courtho...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...
What I was originally responding to was the fear of twitter allowing hateful speech, which ofcourse had to be right-wing "hateful" speech.
My comment was more directed towards how I found that (default) assumption weird, since I see tons and tons of clearly hateful content and attitudes from all sides of the political spectrum online and in social media.
When I see people complaining about all that "hateful" speech online from one end of the political spectrum, I have a hard time seeing that as something else but denial about the hateful speech their side of the political spectrum themselves are promoting, or worse deliberately ignoring.
The fact that you find someone else's opinion disagreeable, distasteful or "hateful" is not a blanket-license for you yourself to act disagreeable, distasteful or "hateful" in response. It's a chance for you to be a better person.
If you want to fix our divided world, you need to show people there's a middle way, and you do that by calling out bullshit on both sides.
And they are upset that they are called uh, names.
I get what you're saying: name-calling is mean. It can deepen divides. I've been called names before. It felt bad.
Yes they’re names, does this mean the position of the left that speech can be hateful is invalid?
NO! This is extremely dangerous misinformation. Nobody on the right is trying to end democracy. This is a lie started by the left media in order to convince the left to get out and vote. If you keep spreading this misinformation, you will likely push people on the left to violence.
Maybe they thought they were fighting
oppression. But at the same time they
were oppressing. They became what they
claimed to fight.
Oppression involves systemic power. Control of the courts, the justice system, the police, the government, of business. Some or all of the above.
Some protestors acted badly! They were wrong! I agree with you! But that is not the same as oppression.
Why is what BLM and antifa always excused? Why can’t you condemn it so we can fix the country? Some of us are over the left v right politics and want the left to realize their problems so we can all move on.
So how come BLM and Antifas actions are not condemned by the left?
I actually completely agree with this.
> Why is it you’re acting like there’s only one “left voice”? There will always be communists and SJW’s free speech doesn’t work if you act like the extreme voices are the mainstream or only voices of value.
Because increasingly they look more and more aligned. And regardless if personal beliefs, the non-extremist still vote on the same lines as the extremists. That’s why we’re coming up on a recession now.
Why imagine? Twitter is full of malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech on any day of the week. That has long been the case. True, some instances of such speech which went contrary to political ideology of Twitter employees and management was deleted, but other instances, that aligned with their ideology, were flourishing. And consumers of Twitter and advertisers don't seem to mind too much.
I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t work out for him because network effects are really hard to overcome.
But my confidence that I can forecast this is low, I'm mostly taking a stab for a bit of fun and to look at this comment in a few years.
One thing I have a high degree of confidence is that Musk will declare victory in almost any outcome, and if it's really so egregious that he can't declare victory with a straight face, he'll find some way to blame everyone else in the world.
Pretty sure you mean "erring", here.
In reality... they'll probably move to TikTok because "that's what the kids use these days".
I try to be neutral about him, but as a Software Engineer, he is easy to admire, he is able to work on various tech related companies at once and make it work. That is no small feat. We have discussed on HN before that companies like Amazon having employees peeing in bottles usually those sort of issues come down from the top (CEO tier) and trickle down to the bottom, if that's true, and Elon is awful, it would show in all his companies, but he manages to delegate correctly enough to keep a few large companies going.
Again, you can grant that Elon is a super genius, and it doesn't impact the moral dimension.
That's exactly the kind of people who were making the decisions all along (public health officials and laptop-class academics).
I don't understand the point you're making.
Musk was correct that COVID was wildly overblown and similar to flu. Fauci himself said it was flu-like back in March 2020 iirc, because it was. Musk is meanwhile highly accountable; people can just not buy stuff from him. You can't get public health officials out of your life that easily.
At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing their capacity, some did and had to declare major incidents rerouting patients to other nearby hospitals which were also nearing their capacity...
Even if the death toll from covid would have been ZERO for every infected person, assuming they were able to get a hospital bed, without lockdowns reducing the transmission, we would have ran out of hospital beds. Ambulances would have been sat outside the hospitals unable to unload their patient's. At this stage all elective/emergency surgery would have stopped. The 999 operators would have been swamped which wouldn't matter anyway because there is nothing they can do as all the ambulances are stuck. Imagine calling for an ambulance after a car crash, or for a family member after a household accident, not only do you not get one but the hospital wont accept a patient if you drop them off.
Elon is no doubt highly intelligent, he would have known this.. He also would have known that if he kicked up enough of a fuss, and sent his own employees in, this would have little effect on the overall hospital bed status and he could avoid fines by threatening to take his business elsewhere or just pay them and still make a profit by having the factory open.
How many were at the hospital purely out of an abundance of media-stoked and politician-stoked fear, and would have recovered just fine had they stayed home and waited it out like they would have for any other cold?
We know that there was massive overreaction and unjustifiable paranoia exhibited by many people and organizations to pretty much all aspects of this situation, and this went on for over two years in some cases.
It's not unreasonable to expect the same irrationality to have affected the medical community and the decisions they were making.
Even before mid-2020, it was clear to any rational observer that the situation was severely overblown, and there was a lot of completely nonsensical behaviour taking place for no good reason at all.
The main reason this foolishness went on for years was because of the overt censorship and demonization we saw of those who were merely taking a rational look at the situation and expressing how irrationally others were behaving.
You're accusing other people of being paranoid, while wildly downplaying the severity of COVID. Every reaction must seem like a paranoid overreaction from the perspective that it's "just a cold," but the cold does not have a 1% mortality rate (as we were seeing at the time).
I remain baffled by how some people will look at someone fighting for their life on a respirator and say, "wow, what a weak, entitled person, coming to the hospital for life saving care when they could recover from sheer force of will in the privacy of their own home."
Let's look at the situation in the Toronto area, for example. Remember, greater Toronto is Canada's most populous region, and the seventh-most populous metropolitan area in North America.
We know that the counting of deaths was done very questionably. Toronto Public Health itself admitted that as early as June of 2020:
"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596...
Later on, we saw news reports like this one:
"Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili...
We should also consider the role of ventilator-associated lung injury and ventilator-induced lung injury, as well.
We also saw news reports like this:
"Hamilton Health Sciences takes down field hospital that didn't see a single COVID-19 patient"
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/hhs-field-hospital-c...
Like I'd mentioned earlier, there was severe overreaction displayed by many people and organizations, and it resulted in irrational behaviour.
That one field hospital didn't see a single COVID-19 patient could have a lot of reasons for example, patients went to another one.
From my experience, people around me who got COVID suffered and/or died. Others had mild symptoms. You are either lucky or your were not. :(
https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/sciencebrief/excess-mortalit...
They also advise that the actual number of deaths from covid-19 is higher than reported. Regardless, deaths were curtailed due to the measures in place. without these measures, once hospitals reach critical capacity, deaths would sky rocket, not just from covid but all sources.
> Later on, we saw news reports like this one: > "Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"
This report is about two care homes in Ontario, it is not representative of the millions who died.
> We also saw news reports like this: > "Hamilton Health Sciences takes down field hospital that didn't see a single COVID-19 patient"
Tents setup on playgrounds were never the first line of defence, they were a contingency for other measures which worked. without the measures you're arguing against, those tents would have been very much used.
> Like I'd mentioned earlier, there was severe overreaction displayed by many people and organizations, and it resulted in irrational behaviour.
You keep asserting that, I don't agree.
Hospitals in the UK go near or exceed their capacity in any flu season, it happened many times before 2020 and is due primarily to badly managed nationalized health and social care where supply/demand aren't joined up. This doesn't mean anything was wrong with Elon's position.
i’m not so sure this is because of socialized medicine considering how often american hospitals run into capacity issues and the general state of wreckage that is US health care—which by the way is a significant amount the most expensive per citizen in the world.
Primarily due to badly managed privately held, for-profit care where supply and demand aren't joined up. (because it's a hospital and avoiding death is inelastic).
But we do know that states with more lockdowns had lower excess deaths. So in the aggregate we know that lockdowns saved lives.
I try to separate the visionary tech genius side of him from the public crap that he’s done to ruin his public image. He has achieved the impossible so many times that he’s developed a god complex. I can’t speak to the electric car part but I’m impressed that he was able to will the country into caring about electric cars. He literally reinvented the space industry and made it cool again. But personally he’s a shit show that has gone unchecked for too long.
When it comes to Twitter I doubt his magic is going to carry over to running a social media company. His style works because of the culture he’s able to build and the vision that he’s able to sell. From what I can tell he’s ruining the good parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn’t have a vision. Good luck to anyone working there. The years that I spent a working at spacex were the best years of my life that I’d never want to repeat again.
I observe that Musk’s biggest wins is where he has used his enthusiasm and large cachet of celebrity capital to challenge the status quo. Tesla and SpaceX both embody elements of society that sci-fi has been dreaming since we were kids. Self landing rockets flying all the time! Electric robot cars that drive themselves! He challenges entrenched industries to do a thing that people wish they would do, but the bean counters say isn’t worth it. It least that’s how the fanciful narrative goes.
The problem with Twitter (or any social network/super app) is that it is not clear what that “go big, go beyond, dream big” trajectory is. For me personally, it’d be about open source, open walls, federation, and above all no fricking advertisement/surveillance economy. I don’t see how Musk’s acquisition here achieves that or any other “dream for the stars” aspiration one has for Twitter.
And His dream for the stars aspiration for Twitter is a public square where people exchange communication and ideas freely, civilly and honestly. Some might argue that is a crazier dream than autonomous rockets, Mars and electric cars!
That is his really great talent: getting smart people to put their resources behind ambitious projects. That was also Elizabeth Holmes's talent, and Adam Neumann's. So far, he has done well at pivoting that inspiring message to real results, unlike the other two.
Cargill to Ikea
For example, Walmart has 560B+ revenue per year and a market cap of 380B.
Several big law firms are likely worth over $100 billion if they ever were equity financed, but use a partnership structure for legal reasons. The same for large hedge funds, which use partnerships for tax reasons.
This list has some more traditional companies that have stayed private but have high revenue:
https://www.forbes.com/largest-private-companies/list/
Some of them would crack $100 billion valuation, but not all (eg Publix at #3 on the list probably wouldn't, but Mars at #4 would).
Here's a worldwide list with the same caveat:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_private_non-...
These lists only include companies that report their revenue for one reason or another (eg to get a loan). Many profitable private companies don't - their owners like to stay private and extract cash from the business rather than having to keep the profit in the business.
State-owned companies are another group entirely, and are often worth a ton.
Things are not worth doing simply because they are risky - that's just more fetishism. They are worth doing because they solve problems. Space travel has the potential to solve certain problems, and is already solving lots of problems today. Mars colonization is not a serious proposal to any problem, because it can't be accomplished on any time horizon we're planning for. Mars colonization will likely never happen, and if it does, it is far beyond the foreseeable future (>100 years).
So; SpaceX's rockets (and satellites) could certainly be useful, and are certainly useful today, but as GP pointed out, Musk's stated purpose is nonsense.
Feel free to sit down and do nothing. While others do something.
Why do you feel entitled to dictate how other people must spend their time and resources, even to fail.
At the scale of indicuals I would agree people should be free to try whatever hairbrained schemes they please, at that scale who am I to say what will work out or won't or what success even means.
What concerns me is that so many people are buying into false solutions and transparent grift about real and pressing issues that impact us all collectively. Musk isn't a crackpot who should be tolerated in the interests of liberty, he's a public figure who is actively causing harm, and I believe will cause more in the future. So I'm certainly entitled to share my views on this public figure, and I'll continue to do so. I'm curious why you would respond to that so defensively.
Because
I think I shouldn't do X. == ok
I think You shouldn't do X. == no
I think you should get all the rights to not start a rocket company, car company, a tunnel boring company, solar panel company. But you demanding others not start all those companies seems to be wrong to me.
Again, I give you all the rights do sit down and do nothing.
The freedom you seem to be advocating for is freedom from other people having opinions, existing, or speaking to you. As if they only mattered when they agreed with you or were willing to help you, and they became irrelevant the moment they had a criticism. I think you should reconsider. I think life is better with vigorous debate with people you disagree with, and that the things you so badly want to "get done" will be richer and deeper if you engage with people who may not like what you're doing. Otherwise, how could there be any other outcome than finding yourself surrounded by yes men?
The strongest argument is Tesla still doesn't have self-driving cars considering he's given it tons of attention for years and missed ETAs many times, but they're clearly getting there.
That said, while I do think space travel is crazy cool, the prospects of living on Mars are quite long-term and a _lot_ of work to the point you might ask if it's really worth it worrying about it right now. How are they going to solve the atmosphere? Or even more impossible, how are they going to solve the ionizing radiation from space? I guess they could just live in closed-off domes but still...
you can read this sentence and come away with the conclusion that he doesn't do anything, or that he is responsible for everything. To me, it mostly seems like he has a bunch of money / financing so he can pay people to try lots of often very dumb ideas and some might work. His core "skill" being an accumulation of immense wealth.
you might say "you need both ideas and execution, and he is an ideas guy", which is correct, but i think the level of credit (and compensation) is wildly skewed towards the "ideas guy" in this case
Jobs was viewed as the idea guy when he went back to apple, and it wouldn't have been really different if that was his first time there instead of returning.
Their impact on the Roadster is debatable. Their impact on Tesla, as a whole, is effectively zero.
You say his core skill is accumulating wealth but that’s a reductive way of looking at the world. His core skill is his ability to sell you on his ideas. He sold the world on electric cars and he sold the best rocket scientists and engineers on his space ambitions. He’s a tremendous leader and you’d be foolish to underestimate him.
Again, I don’t fanboy him but I do give credit where credit is due. I worked there and I even briefly worked with him on a project that he cared about. He’s brilliant at some things but his god complex is off the charts. He’s an asshole and his deadlines were insane, but he’s not selling snake oil. It takes a team, and that includes leadership.
Our culture tends to deify leaders when it’s really a team effort. Don’t blindly hate the guy because others fawn over him. He’s human, and a deeply flawed one at that, but wow can he motivate a team to achieve the impossible.
"If all it took was assembling a team of ace engineers then Musk would be unremarkable and we’d have no end to amazing things" ever heard of bell labs?
These people and quite a few other experts in this field disagree with you.
> 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
> 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 - Head of Avionics, Launcher
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
Maybe? But I think he and others would argue that Twitter was gradually losing popularity and had no direction. So I'm not sure "slow death" is such a great culture to hold onto.
1: Profitable
2: More signal, less noise
3: Significantly less misinformation
4: (Maybe) A reliable way to get news
Personally, I'm eating popcorn on this one. I think Musk got himself in trouble for letting his big mouth yap, and he fired the execs as revenge. As a software developer who's seen good and bad organizations, I'm very curious about the layoffs.
Considering day 1 the new head of Twitter posted false information about the Pelosi attack from a site known to publish fake news, I'm going to guess this probably won't be the case.
It’s weird to editorialize fact checks. If Biden said the payments were the highest ever, but the payments were actually lower, then sure add a fact check and provide the real number.
It’s honestly an example of how much of a mess Elon is stepping in with this venture.
Bullshit. ". . . through President Biden’s leadership" is objectively false. It's through the CPI adjustment he had nothing to do with. Even if you leave that out it is intentionally misleading.
It's the sort of lie the media (rightfully) wouldn't let Trump get away with.
Politician X makes a claim that would be torn to shreds in a setting where people are at least trying to be honest. Politician X then gets thousands of supporters blindly agreeing or having meta discussions about almost anything besides what matters.
Until we as a people stop rewarding this behavior, it will only continue.
Unless you want to take the position that it was "biden's leadership" that caused the high inflation, then you could say it was objectively true but uhhh... not something they should be bragging about.
The "fact check" specifically said it was providing context: https://twitter.com/cwt_news/status/1587863492077330432/phot... it was written in a very neutral and factual style. I think it was well placed.
If it were the Trump whitehouse though people would probably be asking if the administration broke the law by removing the tweet and thereby causing the removal of the 1A protected 'fact check'.
I can't see a path to profitability. In particular, "cutting to profitability" never works in momentum driven tech companies. I think he's underestimated how many people love their twitter community but hate twitter as a platform steward.
I'm not trying to minimize the fact that this sucks for those affected, but lets not also forget that prior to the acquisition, the employees were given multiple opportunities to unionize and/or turn Twitter into an employee-owned company. This is the direction they collectively chose to go in instead.
When you're generating and distributing and moderating multiple TB of tweets in real time every day to billions of people and also feeding other corporations parts of that data... maybe you do.
But I don't see why an company and an application of that size couldn't be run by a company of, say, 1500 people, instead of 7000. 250 engineering staff, 250 doing moderation/support, 800 doing sales & account management and 100 in management and 100 doing sundry tasks.
Let's do some napkin math here:
500 million tweets, let's say 10% are reported, and evenly distributed. That would make for reviewing 200,000 tweets per employee per day. That's 7 tweets that need to be moderated per second for a standard 8 hour day.
190m active users, .1% of which need support daily. On top of 7 tweets per second, that's just shy of three user support tickets per second that they need to manage as well.
And that's without weekends, holidays, sick days, etc.
EDIT: Let's go the other way with napkin math too.
Let's say each content moderator can review 6 tweets per minute.
50m tweets to be moderated at that velocity means you need around 136,000 man hours per day. For an 8 hour day, that's 17,000 employees. Too many.
So you make an ML algorithm that processes the reported tweets, but needs backup and spot checking on 10% of those. 1,700 content moderators (and a team dedicated to building/maintaining the ML report checking algorithm).
Now, about those support requests. Based on my experience from being a CSR for Amazon years ago, you'll probably want 2-3 minutes per support request, and that's if you're sending a form letter back. 1.9m requests at 20 per hour means some 95,000 man-hours per day, or 12k CSRs. Too many. Another ML algorithm (and team to maintain it) and we're down to 1,200 CSRs.
About 3 thousand employees plus their support structure, just to handle tweet reports and CSR requests.
Based on napkin math, 7,000 employees makes a lot of sense to me.
10% reported seems high, possibly by as much as an order of magnitude. The overwhelming majority of tweets are vapid and innocuous.
It seems like an ML algorithm could do better than 90%. It doesn't have to be as perfect as driving a car; if it screws up occasionally it will merely annoy users (and probably the users that are most troublesome).
If twitter becomes a more permissive environment, less censorship is necessary. Agree or disagree with it, it means less work for the censors.
Paid subscriptions give you a significant new trust metric for users.
The rest you can farm out to mechanical turk?
250 seems within the realm of possibility. People will complain about you the same way they complain about Google, but they'll keep using your product.
Also, having worked for a company that did ML sentiment analysis and content analysis against the twitter firehose, the accuracy of ML was closer to 65% than it was 99%. Yes, the company had a huge in-house crew dedicated to checking that 35%, and monitoring twitter manually for anything missed.
Twitters actual numbers (from https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/rules-enforcemen...) show that 11.6m reports were generated in the period July to December 2001, which is roughly 65,000 reports per day. ML could easily reduce this number further, but with 100 employees doing moderation, even without ML, that's 650 reports per day. That's getting towards doable.
Not all reviewed-for-moderation tweets would happen because of user reports.
Seeing how poorly ML works for moderation (Too many false positives), I don't think it belongs anywhere near it.
The problem is that you could offer a user a path to request a human review moderation action taken by ML, but bad actors that knowingly break rules will just request human review and at that point, the ML is worthless.
The types of things that require scaling out engineers is supporting video embeds from 100s of different video hosting platforms.
I don’t like EM at all, but truth is internet companies are making so much goddamn money, they have employee pools absolutely full of turds.
Vastly more innovative and scaled crazy fast without fail whales or anything.
Or look to Telegram today. Delivering a vastly more complex product with a fraction of the company size it seems.
The difference between a messaging app and a microblogging app is basically the difference between an O(n) problem and an O(n^2) problem.
If you don’t think that adds some complexity, you’re kidding yourself.
But have you looked at the scale of what Telegram provides both in width and at scale?
Certainly there are celebrities with more followers on Twitter than the largest Telegram channels, but Telegram scales surprisingly far, and I haven't seen it struggle more than once or twice since the start.
It's clear you are totally clueless about how many features telegram has.
Scaling this is easily done with decomposition and sharding coupled with a suitable key->value mapping of external id to current shard. I first sharded e-mail delivery and storage for millions of users 23 years ago. It was neither hard nor novel to do then, with hardware slower than my current laptop handling hundreds of thousands of users each.
Do you believe that every Twitter user has an inbox stored on disk somewhere that just contains every tweet posted by someone they follow?
You also don't need to store every tweet, you need to store the id's of the tweets (a KV store of the tweet id to full tweet is also easy to shard), and since they're reasonably chronological the id's can be compressed fairly efficiently (quite a few leading digits of tweet id's are chronological).
You also have straightforward options for "hybrid" solutions, such as e.g. dealing with extreme outliers. Have someone followed by more than X% of total userbase? Cache the most recent N tweets from those accounts on that small set of timelinesyour frontends, and do joins over those few with users who follow them.
Most importantly, it's an extensively well tested pattern in a multitude of systems with follower/following graphs whenever consumers/reads dominate over a period of decades at this point, so behaviours and failure modes are well understood with straightforward, well tested solutions for most challenges you'll run into, which matters in the context of whether it'd be possible to build with a small team.
Put another way: I know from first hand experience you can scale this to millions of users per server on modern hardware, so the number of shards you'd need to be able to manage to deal with Twitter-level volume is lower than the number of servers I've had ops teams manage (you'd need more servers total, because your read load means you'd want extensive caching, as well as storage systems for e.g. images and the like - there's lots of other complexity, but scaling the core timeline functionality is not a complex problem)
Look at what they didn't do, which was make any revenue, or support any customers, or moderate any content.
I know I at least was shouting at them to take my money: it was the perfect HN product, reasonably priced, technically superior and with no ads or tracking.
And yes, I paid as well.
Twitter is a 'universe of 100M connected people'.
WhatsApp mostly connected single entities together.
So, for example, 'real time search' and 'relevant updates'.
Imagine taking a firehose of 100M people's random thoughts, putting that into an index, making it instantly searchable. Now pull up the most relevant thoughts from those 100M to each and every other 100M user.
Now moderate all of it in really subtle ways, whereupon most of the 'negative activity' is tantamount to spam or annoying behaviour, and not anything we might normally consider 'abuse'.
That's an incredibly different challenge and that's only two small artifacts of what they are doing.
Twitter is not rocket science, but it's not trivial either.
Also consider that R&D is usually maybe on 20% of overhead - yes - it takes 'all those other jobs and expenses' to run a company.
Some of these statements are a bit glib.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
(A blog is also a broadcast messaging service, so I think you’re both right).
Public companies typically have growth as a goal. Twitter was not making a lot of money. Some of these people were working on building a future Twitter that would grow bigger and richer. I'm not saying they were on the path to success, just that I expect a lot of the activity there could be described that way.
Five years ago you could say of Uber 'You don't need 5000 people to run a freelance Taxi app', when they had hundreds (thousands?) of people working on autonomous driving. Amazon didn't seem to need scores of backend engineers to run a web store, but now AWS is a huge business. Google employs vast numbers of people but has a relatively small number of impactful products, only some of which make money.
Again, not claiming they were doing it well, just that they were trying stuff beyond maintaining what we see.
So in this hypothetical, the people building the future of the company have achieved nothing during this time and should absolutely be removed or replaced.
Uber cut their losses. Twitter needed a change of owner to get there.
That said, I would think they are axing critical people. Then struggle and either fix it or go under. Whenever I was involved in layoffs, critical people have been laid off (from my perspective).
As a manager I was forced to lay off critical people before M&A. Because they we're critical positions I did rehire the positions after acquisition.
"Love to borrow money to buy a company and then saddle that company with the debt so I can lay off thousands of people"
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1587457450311122945
I do however feel that there should be civility in these layoffs regardless of what Musk's belief's about performance of these employees (or Musk fanboi's). There should be proper severance/healthcare and prorated vesting.
Similar stuff is happening with most of the local papers in the country. Although in that case the whole business model is dying. But vulture capitalists are hastening the demise by squeezing every the lifeblood out of the business and destroying what's left of the public goodwill.
Actually it does when large number of houses get repoed. it did happen in 2008. that was because of securitization & rating mistake by banks but that speaks to my point, if the banks have a bad valuation model & give out unservicable loans then they have to eat the loss, just that everybody was doing that in 2007 because of repeal on many laws around such speculation.
this seems to be a similar thing as long as it does not happens to be systematically tilted towards overvaluation but I'd argue businesses (esp public ones) are more closely watched and market does a semi reasonable job of valuing them over time. personally there is not a whole lot of growth left in twitter (or FB) except for changing to a new business model like identity verification or eat into FB's lunch ;-). But as I said we'll see.
This is VC speak that is gibberish and means nothing.
what I hope is that it shrinks to about 1/20th its current size. And then many many smaller platforms spring up. I think one thing that makes social media hard to manage is the sheer scale. It's likely much easier to manage/moderate a smaller social network than a huge one. Also, it wouldn't be as dramatic to be kicked off a platform because then you'd just go somewhere else.
if not that, then i hope Musk moves it from the users being the product to the users being the customer. Charge $10 for 1,000 tweets but keep it free to read. Or maybe charge money for rate of tweets like $10 gets you 5 tweets a day. Make it cost money to engage. Twitter would probably shrink (which is good IMO) but also make more money ( which is good ) and make mobrule, massive information warfare etc cost actual money.
and they are successful by interoperating, until one becomes more popular than the others and turns proprietary. (I just want to get my prediction in also)
That's not how social networks work because the bigger they are the more useful they are to users.
I get the point information warfare, but you may as well just wish for Twitter and other social media platforms to outright die.
People will be flipping out the whole time and a few Twitter competitors will rise, which will be great. Each Twitter alike will take on its own culture and the bubbles will now be network wide, much like they are with big press outlets like Fox and NYT. But Twitter will be the big daddy that all the journalists are on and if you want to broadcast something it will be the best place.
However good you are, if you pay way too much for something, you're worse than someone who just didn't overpay and made no other changes.
People seem to think one of three things about Elon Musk:
A) Musk is a typical rich asshole who only loves money. B) Musk is a typical power hungry asshole who loves power and money is a side effect. C) Musk is a big nerd who thinks he can solve big problems better than other people, and power and money are side effects.
I believe he's type C (Hopeful Nerd). So for that type of person, his positive return is solving the problem. He thinks he can fix social media. He thinks social media is a big problem. He thinks humans need to fix social media or they are fucked, just like if they don't get off oil they are fucked, and just like if they can't leave Earth they are fucked. Fundamentally, he does think humans are worth saving.
I would bet that the vast majority of people that choose to work with Elon believe he is type C (Hopeful Nerd) and believe in humanity as well. That's why they put up with all of his flaws and toxicity - because they believe in the cause and know it's a broken eggs == omelet situation.
He seems to embody all three “types” fairly well.
And I agree with OP - all this will be forgotten when Twitter is considered an elite place to work in a few years. Love him or hate him, but the guy attracts really talented people that want to work with really talented people.
+1. It's hard to see how the ROI works out here. The price was 50% overvalued if not more, and Twitter has had severe problems with monetization.
On the other hand, Musk actually uses Twitter at scale unlike the previous management of the company. That might give him more insight into the possibilities than his predecessors.
I once watched the YouTube video of musk talking about battery prices and buying raw materials on the London exchange, and I thought, wow this guy is so insightful, no wonder his companies do well. It’s not till later that I found out that everything he says is someone else’s idea that he takes credit for.
There are a zillion ideas out there. The idea (!) is to be able to pick the right ones.
For example:
1. never give up
2. don't beat a dead horse
Which idea is correct?
John Carmack reflects the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQro0rkg2DE
George Hotz reflects the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P_Y8CUcqks
Andrej Karpathy reflects the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE
Among hiring managers at big companies, they absolutely do.
The idea that spacex engineers are lazy / don't work hard etc is fanciful thinking. SpaceX being badly managed? Maybe true. But engineers at spacex? If you look at competitors like an engineer on the SLS project (which has taken 10-20 years to get to one 20B rocket launch) - no question who you'll want to hire if you are in "new space". I think for old space companies - probably still worth hiring SLS type folks just given that they will know how to deal with the paperwork of those jobs.
I would NEVER work for Tesla or SpaceX (work life balance way off). But neither would I claim they are lazy or poor engineers.
I know of a few folks from what I would call older line engineering (thinking boeing / SLS type places) actively looking to get onto a musk company (younger folks generally pretty eager to do work).
It's pretty visable when you see NASA administrators doing presentations and then SpaceX folks (who all seem like they are in their 20's to me). Pretty clear you are getting a lot more experience at SpaceX then in the big SLS subcontractor stack for example. I'm adjacent to this space a bit and I think most of the senior folks leaving tesla / spacex (plenty of them) have all landed pretty well despite your claims.
I don't like Musk, I don't like Tesla, I don't like (most of) what SpaceX does. But as a professional I can't agree with your Reddit-AntiWork-MuskIsEvil portrayal of those companies. It's just not true.
What do you not like about SpaceX?
It's 'social' and 'media' which are completely different operating environments.
Twitter is long, long established as another company.
The 'user base' of Twitter is entirely different kind of customer.
He has no 'big government subsidies' to rely on, aka neither Tesla nor Space X would exist without major budgetary support from Big Gov.
I suggest Twitter under Elon may be more profitable. Or different in some other way as well, but I'll give it only 25% chance it becomes like you're suggesting.
Energy is subsidised, roads exist, international commerce, the internet, laws, money.
It's still not obvious to me what they did with 7500 people that couldn't have been done with 10% of that
Feel like there are more and more people here who know nothing about the industry.
In an environment like that, "rock stars" who can knock out projects in short order are going to see their careers skyrocket. But the trick is, they're going to pull this off by taking every shortcut they can. Code reviews are out, refactoring is out, performance and scalability concerns are out, etc. They will successfully launch the thing and then flee to the next glorious launch opportunity.
This will work very, very well for a while. The thing about taking on a lot of debt is that it allows you to accomplish big things in short order. But the debt will be hidden, and over a year or two, they will start to find that suddenly getting projects done is becoming nearly impossible, even compared to the pre-Musk days. And things will slowly fall apart.
It might be that all of the technical debt they're about to take on will have been worth it. Debt's a tool, and maybe making big changes to adjust their company's heading is worth it. And maybe to Musk, it's VERY worth it, because technical debt doesn't show up on financial ledgers, and he probably wants the company to look as solvent as possible.
But I wouldn't want to be a software engineer there in a year.
Social media just isn't these days, from an engineering perspective. The fun parts (scaling distributed infrastructure) are already old hat and it's mostly a business rules complexity problem. Most of what all these people are doing relates to complicated and boring business details. It's a corporate job. It won't pay, for engineers, in excitement, so it has to pay in money.
So I'm not sure where all these people that are so excited to work their asses off for something that will be boring for them will come from (exciting for the businesspeople, as there are very hard business problems, but not for the engineers, as there are no hard tech problems in this domain anymore).
The only option will be to do what FAANG and hedge funds have always done, and either really overpay to force top talent to care about these boring problems, or just settle for average talent with average productivity and average outcomes.
I'm also curious at the rumblings from US politicians. What would happen if the USA nationalised Twitter? Given that politicians from all over the world use it too. A case for a UN intervention?
So many people I know are leaving Twitter, but the political class seems to need it, so I don't see it dying any time soon.
Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!
Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!
If Musk's behavior with exec termination is any indication, there will be no severance package.
He’s going to have to be paying out at least 2 months pay as severance.
Twitter had a loss but had been profitable before. Twitter has a huge following/user-base worldwide. The hard part of creating the brand has happened.
He just needs not to break it, trim some fat and appease advertisers. (In a possible recession, so that is the hard part of his job.)
The HARD problem Elon has is of his own creation. He took leveraged massively to bring this deal to fruition. During a downturn. So if let us say Tesla stock goes down considerably that might be an issue.
If Twitter does not get called for its debt, Elon is going to make lots of money when he "brings it back to the people," out of pure kindness mind you, and it goes public again or there is a secondary offering. He bought it in bad times at "low brand value."
The other value to Elon is he will increase his brand. Elon's value is in his name. Twitter can help him there, as it does daily.
Edit: P.S. Oh, a bit more related: It will get sued. In fact it already is in the process from my understanding for botching/ignoring California WARN act regarding layoffs. So... good way of spending money. And he can not demand them to waive it off with a severance letter.
that’s akin to saying, I hardly drive so I don’t care about the price of gas. Doesn’t bother me.
twitter has influence and reach far beyond what the mDAU implies.
At that point WhatsApp had first class clients for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia and Web + a server backend that scaled to 2B+ daily users.
This doesn't happen by accident. WhatsApp founders created an environment where this could happen:
- focusing on a few things (saying no a lot)
- everyone on the team is highly capable
- a work environment that allows people to focus on work (minimal meetings, good long term planning, fixing root causes vs constant firefighting...)
If Elon "pulls it off" and shows other tech company leadership boards "you can get by with 1k employees instead of 7k" (or whatever the final number ends up being), what does that mean for the future of tech jobs?
So, here's what I've never figured out...
Once your app is built, and you've figured out how to scale it, and everything is autoscaling nicely, and you've reached the critical mass Twitter has...why do you still need all the engineers? Why do you need to keep growing?
At some point, isn't the scaling solved? Once you have a platform that can handle 400M MAUs, what more is there to build?
Does it really take 1,000 engineers to maintain? I'd think automation could take care of most grunt work involved with maintenance.
Anyway, on this one I consider the chance of failure to be high, from a financial point of view but also because a social network is not an engineering challenge. That said, he seems to seek out such unlikely adventures.
I think Twitter will first take a massive hit before it rises to new heights, if it does.
this is a sign that youve never had to support the scale of a popular social network
Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now.
I think this is also a great experiment for everyone who either thinks Elon is a genius and the greatest thing to bless this Earth, or those who say he's overrated and Tesla and SpaceX were successes independent of him. I think Twitter has been around long enough that we've all formed impressions of it. Let's see what this single change of replacing ownership actually results in.
Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?