That's bad for him and so far it seems bad for Twitter, but it was good for the shareholders, and it's good generally that contracts get enforced.
It has already been proven Twitter will stop being the Twitter its users have enjoyed for the past decade. You are free to argue Twitter will be better for it but there is absolutely no disputing the old Twitter is dead.
The point I was making is that nobody seems to think any particular thing, other than that which can be post-rationalized from their feelings, pro or anti Musk. The whole thing has the loosened-reality-grip feel of a culture war battle.
> Firing the leadership and a massive percentage of the workforce at once changes who the company is. I am not entirely sure why this needs to be explained.
Sure. QED. But not a point related to mine.
> That just means what you wrote is not related to anything I wrote
See parent post.
That just means what you wrote is not related to anything I wrote
Dorsey left, didn't he? There's been some fairly major executive turnover over the years. Twitter sort of hummed along, didn't it?
You remarked, hyperbolically I'd say, that he speed ran the destruction of a $40 billion-whatever acquisition in mere weeks. That may turn out to be true. But it hasn't happened yet. I think many people want this to be true, but this is an exceptional event and is hard to make dispassionate predictions about. It's possible, but improbable that it'll take the shape of Newscorp's myspace acquisition, or Verizon's yahoo acquisition. Those were services that were already in steep decline. I don't know for sure, but Twitter appears to be relatively stable when it comes to user activity.
Overall, I think the prognostication around this acquisition has been inflamed by culture war biases.
You have already agreed with me on this in a different comment. The pre Musk version of Twitter no longer exist, it has been destroyed. Musk has destroyed it. Whether or not the brand name of Twitter continues to exist or be popular is yet to be determined but Twitter as we knew it is dead.
The Atari brand name and intellectual property continues to exist but that pioneering video game company hasn't existed for decades
The value of their core product is not primarily technical but social and cultural, as has been pointed out ad infinitum (the “twitter clone” microblogging weekend project in new language/framework is a cliche). Musk does have the ability to quickly burn that cultural capital. But it’s too early to tell to what extent it will happen, and in what ways it will hurt the service.
Even the most outraged user claims are unreliable. Too many users get too much value out of the professional, cultural and social networks they’ve formed using Twitter. I’ve already read one gloomy, regretful account of migrating to mastodon. There’s a high probability that many of these users, who are loud but unquestionably in the minority, will eventually return after self imposed exile.
Whether the product itself will implode or degrade for technical reasons, very few are in a position to accurately predict.
Comparing Twitter to Atari seems unfair to Atari, a company that had success in several markets and that successfully innovated for a sustained period of time.
I think an instructive comparison may be Musk’s acquisition of The Onion staff, which (according to my memory of the incident) he did primarily out of spite. His attempt to launch a rival humor website with those writers flopped disastrously, and was quickly forgotten. It’s support for the argument that Musk will approach a cultural product with an engineering mindset. But it remains to be seen what, if anything, he learned from that experience.
Maybe that's a bit too much to ask of humanity at this stage of its development, but a person can always dream!
Does it matter that his method wasn't ideal, at least he wasn't pushing for nuclear war like many politicians.
To me, Musks calls are equivalent to saying “ok, now freeze the frontline until Russia has had time to rearm and rebuild for the next push”.
We tried the “peace” proposal Elon put forth in 2014, thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians are now dead as a result.
"We will have peace," said Théoden at last thickly and with an effort. Several of the Riders cried out gladly. Théoden held up his hand. "Yes, we will have peace," he said now in a clear voice, "we will have peace, when you and all your works have perished--and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us. You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter a men's hearts. You hold out your hand it to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor. Cruel and cold! Even if your war on me was just--as it was not, for were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired--even so, what will you say of your torches in Westfold and the children that lie dead there? And they hewed Háma's body before the gates of the Hornburg, after he was dead. When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you and Orthanic. So much for the house of Eorl. A lesser son of great sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers. Turn elsewhither. But I fear your voice has lost its charm.”
― J. R. R. Tolkien
Everybody wants peace. Peace is a good thing. But what most people agree on is that you don't give an autocrat anything they want just for the promise of peace. Most people remember that lesson from 1938.
We generally know how Chamberlain's whole deal turned out.
All war ends in appeasement.
Don't forget WW2, when Nazi Germany under Hitler annexed Czechslovakia in 1938, invaded and split up Poland in 1939 and all the Great Powers did not do anything due to either appeasement or isolationism. We need to learn from history, expansionist dictators do not stop and conceding to them only leads to further war and likely world war.
And in light of past civil wars, what is the best solution for neighboring nation? I am fairly certain every country has taken land this way, so maybe we should give Texas and California back to Mexico?
Russia is NOT in the right, but Russia's actions don't change how we should be pushing for peace.
Where have all the hippies gone?
The American invasion of Iraq, that was kicked off with a night of bombing destroying nearly everything, that was much more than anything Putin opened with I don't agree at all with Putin's actions, but could you please explain how they are genocidal?
The Ukrainian treatment of ethnic Russians, the incessant shelling of civilians in the separatist regions, the widespread embrace of actually Nazi ideology, and the cutting off of freshwater supply to those areas seems a bit closer to genocidal to me. Just a bit.
Could be part of a pump of the stock. Something he's done in the past, see FSD,coast to coast trip with no driver, battery swaps, the Cybertruck roadster and Semi, whatever that robot was,4680 batteries..........
Musk’s initial Twitter takeover talk was met with general opprobrium, to put it mildly. I must have read more than one take that it was a threat to democracy itself.
Then, after a stock market downturn, and when the Twitter acquisition looked more like an impulsive decision that Musk might regret, the prevailing mood was gleeful. He was stuck with a white elephant. Schadenfreude. And since he clearly no longer wanted it, the consensus now he was legally and morally obligated to buy. Twitter itself demanded it. They weren’t going to let him weasel out of that one.
Now that he seems to have accepted his obligation and the sale has gone through, we’re back to opprobrium.
It’s callous to laugh when so many people have lost their livelihoods (although I’m confident any former Twitter employee has plenty of employment options). But the commentariat consistently outdoes what a satirist could invent.