"Just web dev" stuff is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It's not like Twitter is just some react code on the cloud. It's been around since 2006 and is essentially a massive realtime platform. I don't think Twitter has any unique secret sauce, but the kind of people who can run a large online platform and dedicated metal really don't exist anymore; and under fire they will either need to run to the cloud (increasing costs) or start dealing with outages.
>I do think he'll probably pull this off
It seems far more likely to me that he ends up selling it to Google or something for pennies. So far, publicly, he hasn't communicated any sort of thesis or plan and most of the head engineering staff has been let go. How long do you think it will take to get a new engineering lead up to speed on 16 years of Twitter infra while also meaningfully transforming the company? His only option at this point is maintaining the app on a shoe-string budget to get "profit", but that seems like a very boring outcome that should have been left to a P/E firm.
I guess it says good things about EM that I could totally see waking up tomorrow to the news that he sold it to Google for $75m and a new pixel phone. I can even see the Tweet: “well that was a disaster.”
For all his faults, he does not seem beholden to consistency.
Although Elon appears to be aggressively driving twitter into the ground, this might be one of the few outcomes which actually increases the certainty of twitter getting killed.
I like that you also came up with the idea that elon will sell for pennies when in reality he's basically succeeded at nearly everything he's done. And he's had massive win after massive win. But you think he's gonna fail here.
He really believes he’s smartest guy on earth, god’s gift to humanity and he has moral obligation to achieve whatever he wants to.
That being said I think he is being overly underestimated right now. Clearly he can bring something positive based on history.
SpaceX/Tesla employees work as hard as they do because they believe in the mission of the company. They're willing to just buckle down and do amazing things beyond most people.
Twitter had a lot of normal employees, however, it also already had the true believers in the mission. Those people don't seem to have bought Musk's vision and they're leaving the company. He wanted to get just down to those folks, but I think by and large, they're gone. I don't know that he can recover from that mis-step. He needed to come in, explain his vision and got the true believers onboard before he cleaned house IMHO.
He must know this??
put it on a shirt. twitter is the .01% of web dev. what they do isn't easy and there are no right answers.
WHat I find interesting is the Twitter the business is no more "web stuff" than HN is "web stuff." The real business is on what we might call the product management side, and the central problem to solve when deciding what kind of social media product you have is deciding whether to moderate it, and if so, what you moderate and what you allow.
Even if he miraculously gets enough people motivated work there keeping the lights on and the machine humming, I am with the many people suggesting he has absolutely no idea how to actually run the product side of the business, where decisions like "anybody can rent a blue check for $8 a month" can have drastically negative consequences for the part of your business that sells advertising.
At this moment in time, that side of the business is extremely messy, and it isn't an engineering problem, it's a people problem.
Elon does not strike me as a people person, nor does he appear to be interested in delegating the most important role in the company—the person who decides what Twitter's product is—to anyone with competence in this area.
... that's the point of the original comment. None of this is unique to Twitter.
As an almost ironclad rule, acquisition agreements for big public companies don’t have escape clauses or diligence outs. The buyer does the diligence before they sign the acquisition agreement. His very, very good lawyers at Skadden advised him of this. After it’s signed, it’s really just a question of how quickly the logistics of taking a public company private can be completed.
Musk, for all intents and purposes, bought Twitter back in April. He just didn’t take possession and pay for it until October.
This was not a mistake. He was seeing that his offer to buy twitter was not taken seriously. Understandably the board felt he will flake out. He wanted to show he won't flake out. The way he could demonstrate that was by binding his own hands.
So he went to his lawyers and asked them to write an offer he can't back out from. And then he got what he asked for.
I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size.
Immediately starts by threatening advertisers, retweets that story about Pelosi's husband, fires people (probably needed to be done) and then this crazy scheme.
The problem as someone else mentioned is that for Tesla and SpaceX those were really the only two places where you could work if you wanted to do electric cars or space stuff. So they attracted very dedicated people.
Twitter is just web dev stuff and these people can work anywhere. It's not a great time to look for a job but when you get a lot of middle aged people who don't necessarily want to upend their life for their job especially when it was extremely cushy before, well, it's bound to be a problem.
I do think he'll probably pull this off but it's gonna be a pretty miserable road.