The conversation, leaked: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368/ph...
However, I'm beginning to think Elon didn't get the deep dive he needed to understand what this really means. I have my ears up for the language or relationships showing he is really spending time on this... but I have only seen a dog chasing its tail.
At some level, Elon is characteristically aligned with this version of Twitter, however by saddling current Twitter with so much serviceable debt it is probably more difficult to go back in time than it ever was before.
> a bunch of ex-twitter folks boot up a crowdfunded mastodon instance.
Don't know about crowdfunded, but this instance is for ex-twitter employees.
But only after becoming rich on closed-standard Twitter while also enacting artificial barriers for third-party clients along the way?
https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1586166535592509440
An open protocol isn’t going to help Twitter’s debt load, indeed giving up platform control will very very much do the opposite. Musk knows this. And anyways, there are no engineers left to massively redesign their platform to become less profitable.
My unverifiable prediction: no matter how many users will leave Twitter, the ones left will be more than the ones that would be using a new service after 1, 2, 5 years.
Where will users go - parler?
I mean, there is a model that works, it's Discord. Small self-associating groups from various parts of our lives. TBH that's so far ahead of facebook - humans draw meaning from being in groups where there groups are small enough to know and have repeat interactions with people. Facebook is an ocean and it's unstructured (Google Plus or whatever had user grouping, which was an advancement imo - you can say "that's a work person" and interact with them in certain ways) unless you go out of your way to set it up like that. Discord really just works amazingly well for that, I have tons of hobby groups and game groups where I've known people for a super long time and friend groups from whatever community. Kids have the "school chat discords" and if I was in college we'd have had study groups on it I'm sure, we had FB groups then. No reason you can't have a "family discord" too (so uncool, mom!).
Mastodon basically is (or could be) that as a protocol, if you want to treat it like that. Dress it up in a discord-like client and get it onto phones/etc and make the user-story good. People already show they'll pay to self-host discord servers etc, so come up with a cool "Algo" style ansible deployment thingy that makes it super simple, just fires up a server on an AWS account for you and gives you a link you can send to your friends etc. Congrats, you are now the Underwater Basketweaving Enthusiasts Discord Server. Not everybody needs to run a server, but, make it easy enough that people can do it. And as a user, just join the discords you like and let the server op run it.
https://github.com/trailofbits/algo
What exactly does Twitter do in this business model, though, lol? And how do you get there? Twitter's "broadcast" model is nothing at all like that. I guess they're gonna... throw it all away and start fresh? Seems like that's what's happening I guess.
But I guess I just don't see the value in federation generally, to the end user. Pods aren't authoritative, they're meaningful and human-generated, so oauth type stuff doesn't really matter. Why would I want to "cross the streams" between my home and work pods, or let BP come and mine/advertise my server, etc, if I'm the one running it? Consistent cross-discord-instance identity is all I really want from social media, at most and that doesn't need to be tied to this at all, you can do that via google auth or some other idp that solves that problem. Where is the revenue stream in this at all?
And if you just want a service where you click it and it runs in a hosted instance by a cloud provider... well, discord exists, and dropbox remains popular even in a world of NASs, etc.
- Smaller streams, fewer people, more personal.
- No great feed of everything. You go to a place to read about a thing. Different thing, different place.
If discord had a bit more work that would enable persistent threads like reddit, and encouraged longer, more thoughtful posts like HN and quality moderation, it would be perfect.
Actually, what I want is HN/Discord mashup. Anybody want to fund it?
Facebook Groups is this product - but it's exceedingly difficult to find the small percentage of well-moderated, smaller groups which are specialized/for enthusiasts. Also, the FB sub-comment/response structure is far worse than HN or Reddit and leaves much to be desired. But I've joined a few with good moderation and thoughtful, interesting discussions.
That being said, any group with [thousands] of members or loose moderation devolves into an absolute shitshow of shit posting and scam/spam posters.
On the other hand, also Clown Girl Honk Heaven. Perhaps there is yet hope that Internet Porn will survive 9/11 3.0.
Just give Zucky all your nudes, so he can, uh, keep an eye out for them. A dream come true.
https://futurism.com/facebook-wants-protect-your-nudes
"wait a minute, this is gay as hell..." "yeah, this is way gayer than tumblr". "alright everyone back onto tumblr"
human empathy and working set is totally limited by team size and cache level, you need to optimize for facing the same problems/interests as the person next to you.
Families/localities/regions are the cache layers of empathy. And I'm using "family" broadly.
"Contextual communities" I guess.
I actually detest some companies using it as official communication for their product as none of the question answered are googlable so instead of googling "how to do X" and get some forum post, there is nothing and you have to sign onto their discord and ask same question.
Him saying he's working on web5 should really clue you in on the kind of lying clown he is.
Quick explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDZWWFSZUF0
The board predicted this would happen.
That's certainly looking like it was the right call.
I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. He seems to be very badly advised at the moment. It's going to lead to a elon against the world situation where he wrecks something everyone likes and he's tarnished forever.
He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.
Of course not, if a company is profitable, its technical debt that made the company money and paid the bills. But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years.
> but it was consistent in experience.
Consistent experience of being spammed by bot accounts. Looking at anyone popular and 95% of the replies are bots, or tweeting the wrong word and being spammed by bots. Is a terrible experience which has never been addressed.
> I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself.
I agree. I think over the years popularity has gone to his head, stroked his ego, and he isn't the same person he was 10 years ago. He may not be the greatest example of a 'good' person but wqhat hes done with Tesla, SpaceX, etc, getting the right people in place and such to build these companies up, hes done well, but in the last 4-5 years hes sorta gone off the rails.
Technical debt is rarely that simple. Usually it is a pile of Chesterton's Fences that only the people who built it really understand why its all there, but if you start just ripping it all down then you wind up breaking something important (think "service which scours databases to ensure that they're compliant with GDPR regulations and avoids a billion dollar fine from the EU" or something of that nature). The code may have grown organically and arguably need to be tossed and rewritten, but most of the time the code in its current state is also the requirements doc for the rewrite (and either the rewrite will take 10 times as long as anyone thinks or else the new system will throw away 90% of the old system without understanding it and now you have to deal with pissed off EU regulators and there goes everything you would have saved).
I'm usually on the side where I think its time to take the hard decisions and spend the effort either cleaning up the existing codebase or rewriting it, but that's rarely the way the business sees things, and they'd prefer to just bolt on some more crap yet again to keep it going for another year because they're trying to boost their metrics, not solve long term problems.
My point is when you're in a small company, even dollar counts, if infrastructure isn't trying to optimize hardware utialization then you end up throwing hardware at the problems. If engineering isn't trying to optimize codebases then you're throwing more resources at the problem (people, hardware, time, more services, monitoring, and safe guards). Then there's issues with marketing, sales, management, etc.
The other day we had that tweet from elon 'apologising' for android being slow and the '1000 requests' which was disputed by one of the engineers and he got himself fired.
But what he said is they have 10+ years of technical debt hindering performance.
Large companies like twitter suffer from the idea they are 'too big to fail'. They have 1000s of engineers and I question, what are they doing, you obviously have enough money and resources, but at the same time why are a portion of those people not sitting there optimizing what exists.
We don't see any resolution to bots, we don't see new useful features, we don't see any attempt to address issues people have been complaining about for 10 years. etc. So we have 1000s of engineers doing what exactly? There's some incredibly smart people working or worked at twitter, but their talents were wasted on effectively maintaining a sinking ship by trying to make it sink slower instead of trying to patch the holes and keep it afloat.
If a piece of code works and only needs changes once in a blue moon… well then it’s pretty good. Even if it’s a tangled mess of assembly.
He didn't have that option. That was the fee if the deal fell through for other reasons outside Musk's control. Musk didn't have any out in the contract. When that became clear in Delaware, he gave in.
There's a decent chunk of the population that would be ecstatic if Twitter went away and they never had to hear about it again, so he'd probably gain some fans there.
All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.
Offending everyone who matters that runs the product you just bought and terrorizing all your employees is a fast and easy road to completely imploding any company.
Like, yeah, if he did that to well functioning company it would fall apart too, but Twitter wasn't a well-functioning company. And by that I mean "he would ruin it slower".
When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.
I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.
it's pretty obvious there's a load of sv vultures egging him on
hard to imagine a worse direction for this to go
Let him get distracted with micro-managing whatever cool project is currently takes his fancy, while they do the more boring job of keeping the company running, and making sure the customers are happy. I bet these people are extra happy when he is focusing on projects that don't have customers yet, like Starship/BFR.
Twitter might actually be the first time were he has 100% control over a large company without someone in the background moderating his more wild impulses.
Gwynne Shotwell is the too seldom acknowledged hero of SpaceX, who has played exactly that role of keeping the lights on, moderating Musk’s worse impulses, and managing him into less destructive directions. It’s been evident for years.
There are similar people at Tesla, who focus on the endless operational tweaking and improvement that Musk finds boring, and who slowly fixed all the most critical issues on the Model 3 line while Musk increasingly took to politics and social media.
I’m not one of those who believes Musk hasn’t done anything or played no part in SpaceX or Tesla’s success, because that’s clearly false. But he also hasn’t been the sole genius responsible for all the success or infallible. But too many people have made him believe he was and we’re now seeing the result of that hubris and ignorance.
I was determined to buy a Tesla. Now we placed an order for a VW ID.4.
"Beat up Russia a bunch, make peace and throw Russia a bone by letting them keep Crimea." seems like the death minimising stance to me and in the best interests of the inhabitants of the each region.
Besides that, appeasement has never worked against aggressors in the past. It basically looks like Musk is calling for another Munich Agreement. It shows a complete lack of understanding of history, and of international relations.
That would be like saying "let's throw a bone to nazis and let them keep Poland"...
Except that's not true at all. What he did is saddle it with a bunch of debt and fire of a bunch of really-poorly-considered cosr cutting and revenue enhancement ideas that clearly weren’t thought through or part of a coherent strategy.
He might have and end-game vision, but he had no plausible roadmap to deal with the sucking wounded he inflcted with the acquisition, much less to get to his end-game vision.
If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter.
Engineers not being good is probably not the issue. But I’m pretty sure it comes from higher up.
It’s also evident that Twitter was poorly managed by the fact it’s pretty much never made a profit.
It is not just tech debt per se. In larger companies most middle managers have no incentive to fix things for the long term. And lack of automation means they get to hire more people, which is good for them, as it expands their fiefdom.
I know one company in California which hires H1-Bs by the thousands, many even make it to Green cards. Their work- Somebody sends a bunch of values from the India office, they manually edit shell scripts(written ages ago, by some dude who has long left), run it, get the values and enter those values into some internal application. The thought that all this could be done by web api's didn't cross their mind. Never mind that automating this simple thing could help cut employee count by the thousands. Another place that I heard of, similar things but with SQL. The whole thing could be automated. But somebody wrote a bunch of shell scripts and left shop. Now people need to take outputs from SQL scripts and feed to the next ones. And then cut paste the data into some system.
In the woke world that we live in, where everybody is supposed to be special, and we are supposed to lie to ensure nobody gets hurt feelings. Most people forget, these jobs should have never existed at the first place. Many a times cutting them actually leads to more profits, and saves lots of management effort. Sure people losing jobs is sad, but if you are doing a job that shouldn't exist at the first place, you should likely move before you are let go.
The world is full of wasted effort, it is many times even tolerated for all sorts of reasons. But some times it is not.
That's two figures more than actual. Reportedly, Musk paid Agrawal $42M and spent $120M total on golden parachutes, which is still only low 9 figures. Still obscene. Most employers do not give severance to fired former employees. They were in charge of Twitter while it was losing billions. They should have paid him. He could have saved money right there by giving them the address to the unemployment office.
Pretty hard to fire him for cause with that track record, even if the new owners don’t like it.
And firing without cause triggers the clause.
Twitter was leaking money for 2020 and 2021, the trend looked to be continuing for 2022, they had an OK first quarter, and maybe they were going to continue to do well, but I sincerely doubt it seeing how every single tech stock has performed this year. Q2 alone blew away $344 million loss compared to Q1's $513 million gain. I also sincerely doubt Twitter was being led well by looking at their earnings reports and the money hole that punctured the company coffers in 2020Q2. The middling performance through 2021 continued when that should've been Twitter's best years, all other tech stocks even ad agencies were printing money, why was Twitter not doing the same?
I think Twitter board's best decision they ever made was offloading the company off to Elon, cut their losses for a clearly failing company with little to no headwind coming their way for the next few quarters at minimum.
But I do need to know why does Elon get the brunt of the blame for Twitter's presumed downfall? Seems like Twitter was already a falling knife by itself
Your breathless narration of that data is certainly a master class in spin. Maybe the company was performing far below what would be possible. But it is hard to look at the data and conclude that there was any imminent risk of its demise.
Quarters are only good for forecasting and deciding what to do. Financial year is what matters overall. That’s an indicator of the overall success for the year.
A few reasons
- he's greatly accelerating its decline in a highly visible and embarrassing way
- he got ripped off. $44b is a hilariously bad deal. He could have saved a few billion and used it to run twitter, at a minor loss, for many years.
- and lastly: he tried to catch a falling knife and is standing around pretending he isn't bleeding. Considering the hubris he has put on display over the past 5 years or so, everyone's taking a moment to enjoy the show.
"I've got this old beater that I'm tired of working out of every day."
Your food truck sucks and your food is no better. You should sell churros.
I can fix this, I'll just buy you out for a million dollars.
What do you mean the truck is only worth about three grand? I want out of this deal.
Indented guy above didn't get ripped off.
Insanely profitable. those 2 years had more profit than the previous 8 years of loses.
Jack then fucked it up over the pandemic by massively over hiring but Twitter's profit margins in 2018 and 2019 were insane.
If you go to market and buy a lame horse then flog it into the ground, that's entirely your fault, but it's not like the horse was ever going to race well.
Maybe it could have been more. But a profitable business is, almost by definition, sustainable. There was no need for rash action.
Worse, revenue[2] increased but costs increased faster
By all metrics it was burning money faster than it could increase revenue
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...
I have no idea if TSLA is overvalued or undervalued. I don't know enough about the automotive industry, renewable energy regulations, or batteries to even guess.
Destroying it or disarming it is a win for humanity, I guess.
"elon badly managing it" and "twitter being a shitshow before he took over" do not collide with eachother either
But that wouldn't have saved him from discovery in the court case, and I've also heard rumours the SEC were already looking into him for stock market manipulation over this Twitter thing.
If the financing failed to show up through no fault of the acquirer, then yes, the acquirer could terminate and pay a $1 billion break fee. But there have been recent Delaware cases that suggest an acquirer manufacturing grounds for its lenders to refuse to fund will not excuse the acquirer’s obligation to buy the company - regardless of whatever limited termination fee is written into the contract.
He was hoping he’d look like such a mess they’d step in and shitcan it.
But no one took the bait.
The one who is actively threatening to nuke us because we’re sending millions of tons of weapons and ammunition to someone they’re invading while we sanction them to the gills?
What are you smoking? There is no way they’d let him export Rocket engines to them, or cars. Likely for decades.
I suspect the FBI visited him after his Putin talk and reminded him that they could make him register as a foreign agent, or go to jail for that. Not that anyone would say anything.
Of course he’s going to do what he defaults to and knows best to try to get out of a bad deal?
Can you really say edgelording so hard you appear to be a legitimate national security threat to get out of a $44bln deal you don’t want is something that doesn’t sound typically Elon Musk?
They were happy for him to become a director. He balked as soon as it became clear that he'd have to pass the same background check as all the other directors. I wonder why that is?
> It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.
Like... his degrees being dodgy and having been an illegal overstayer in the 90s, which is a documented claim doing the rounds?
In retrospect, seems like a wise decision.
Companies couldn’t prove a MAC in the middle of the 08 housing crash, musk sure as hell wasn’t having screwed every legal argument he had available weeks in advance.
His options were buy now for 44 billion or buy maybe a month later for 44 billion plus whatever the court decided to tack on for hellishly bad faith dealing and arguments.
His legal team tried every truck available and even a lousy “well we said we’d buy it so they should drop the lawsuit “ play. The court saw right through and said “you get 4 weeks to buy and if not then the suit continues”
So they paid up because to claim you’re going to but then to not go through with it would have seen the most wrathfully phenomenal court proceeding in history.
Discovery was just an added bonus of embarrassment and very unlikely to be related at all. Every sound legal mind working for musk was probably screaming at him to shut up and eventually told him he was going to have to go through. The ONLY way this current situation could be worse is if he had continued to try and fight it after his last Hail Mary because that specific court exists almost solely to VERY quickly mitigate multi billion dollar deals and would absolutely make a very clear example out of anyone who thought they were too rich to touch.
Musk may be one of the most wealthy men in the world but Delaware deals with companies with MUCH higher net worth and resources constantly.
The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Twitter board. They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. The offer to buy the company outright might have been more spite than anything else.
I think he calmed down and realised what a bad idea his offer was (especially at that price), and then spent the next month or so trying to back out.
The second time? Well, he was kind of trapped and was actually forced to buy it.
The twitter board were suing him to hold him to the binding deal to buy at $44 billion that he signed. He only finalised the deal to avoid the lawsuit. It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.