Twitter was fine before Elon, there were no existential risks to it. Everything happening to Twitter today is Elon’s doing. Any story otherwise is Elon’s preferred fiction.

That's not true.

Twitter was already losing money, whilst ads, their primary income source, is taking a hit due to economic problems. At the same time, the way they did ads is (the same as FB) running against secular trends against data sharing and privacy.

Jack and previous management had utterly failed on the product front. Excluding Spaces and Blue (for news junkies, which already got shot), what product changes had Twitter done in the last decade? 280 and what else?

Was all this survivable? Probably, but poor execution by Jack and crew meant that if it wasn't Elon, some hedge fund was going to take over Twitter. And the changes that make Twitter profitable likely, at minimum, badly damage it.

Twitter was doing fine financially, they were consistently floating around break even and they had lots of opportunities to move into profitability if their financial situation became tenuous. As far as technology companies go, they weren’t anything to write home about, they weren’t printing money the way Google does, but they were doing fine.

Twitter doesn’t need to make constant product changes, as is evidenced by their ability to continue to support hundreds of millions of users and consistently generate billions of dollars of revenue: they’re valuable as-is. The Muskian narrative that Twitter needs better programmers who churn out more features is just not true.

I very much agree that Jack was half-assing management of the company but the consequence was that Twitter was falling far short of its potential, not that Twitter was struggling. If your argument is that the lack of profitability makes Twitter vulnerable to activist investors, then, well, you’re about a decade behind on market sentiment. Nobody cares about profitability any more: if the company can sustain itself, which Twitter could, then stock price is all that matters.

I don't think Twitter were fine: they were consistently losing money (to your point, not a ton, but still, losing money even in a great economy), with large layoffs to come, esp once you factor in a 20% or so fall in ad income. With more income cuts, and hence layoffs, on the way as privacy laws worldwide make Twitter worse as an ad platform.

So I would argue that Twitter desperately needs to either get much better as an ads platform, or switch to some form of product that generates subscription revenues. I think that does require large changes and a bunch of features. Maybe not better programmers; probably just product pointing the programmers they had towards different features.

And they already had been a target for activist investors; that was going to continue, regardless of the stock price. See Elliot Management in 2020/2021. So if Musk hadn't done this, I bet someone else would have.

> they were consistently losing money

... with ever increasing revenue to cover it. If you take a look at the quarterly reports, clearly they had a spending problem and not so much a problem with ads.

The business was fine. The leaders were not. Despite that, they certainly weren't bringing Twitter to the brink of bankruptcy.

Twitter was profitable in a couple of recent years and would have been last year to the tune of several hundred million except for a one-find lawsuit payment. That’s not ideal, but all they needed to do to improve things was reduce their stock based compensation levels to be in line with their class of company rather than [old] Google/Facebook-level.

That changed dramatically when Musk added over a billion dollars in annual debt payment load, and proceeded to torpedo their ad business. That changed it from “our boat leaks” to “the hull is gone”, and dramatically reduced the options for dealing with it.

You might even say the front fell off the boat

Their 2021 financial report is literally comical it is so bad for a company that should have been printing money.

I can't stand Musk but my god did he give the shareholders a free lunch. I can't even imagine what the stock price would be right now with no deal.

Pretty much "everyone" in the valley had large layoffs coming. Only Apple and Google have escaped it so far. This is a product of the stupid "grow unbounded" consensus that reigned there, not any idiocy unique to the companies.

Twitter pre-elon had a long runway to slide down. Musk turned that into an "immediate emergency" through unforced errors.

Before, a better leader than Parag could have steered the company to higher profitability- trim some cost/product/teams, improve the ads a bit, and they'd have been back to profitability.

Now, it's unlikely Twitter will survive this mortal blow.

> Twitter pre-elon had a long runway to slide down. Musk turned that into an "immediate emergency" through unforced errors.

To be fair though, Musk probably sees that as optimizing for speed.

It is not appropriate or ethical for the owner of a company to use euphemisms or other language that may downplay or minimize the severity of the company's financial or operational problems. The owner of a company has a serious responsibility to communicate clearly and accurately about the status of the company and to take all necessary actions to ensure its financial stability and success. Using euphemisms or other language that may mislead or confuse people about the true nature of the company's problems could potentially compromise the company's financial health and hinder effective communication and decision-making. It is important for the owner of a company to be transparent and honest about the challenges the company is facing and to work to address those challenges in a responsible and ethical manner.

Love, DangGPT.

Agree. The people want Twitter 1.0 not Twitter 2.0. Musk destroyed Twitter

> there were no existential risks to it

Untrue, by all accounts they were burning through money.

by which accounts? Their financial accounts show a company chugging along without much concern: they had cash in the bank and were averaging break even each year, as had been the case for many years.

I think it can be turned around.

Scrap all the moderation changes musk has made, apologise to all the advertisers, keep headcount at a sustainable level (more than they have now but less than they had when musk bought it), and look to launch some new products (reviving Vine is the obvious one).

I don't think that will work as long as Musk is the majority shareholder.

They have over a billion dollars in new annual debt servicing, meaning they need to make far more profits than even their best years, and that’s before we see how much the new lawsuits will cost them.

Lower headcount could buy some headroom but that’s not going to help launch new products and there’s going to be a hard time staffing. You’d have to be a hardcore Musk fan not to assume that some new random chaos will happen, and as a private company they can’t offer stock to make the deals more appealing.

In theory, yes. But contingent on him picking the right sort of person who plays a straight bat and long game. Clear policies, well articulated. Navigating two polarised camps and shirking the desire to leverage the outrage. Winning back all advertisers. Having a paid tier that isn't so botched that someone needs to clarify "legacy verified" vs "blue" each time it's raised. It all seemed pretty straightforward so it's quite incredible to have wrecked things like this.

All of those obvious moves were possible straight after the acquisition though. Now your final sentence is far more realistic.

Yeah, I was talking about this with some folks earlier: Who out there could meaningfully change the narrative and attract users back?

One person suggested Matt Mullenweg which is about the best answer any of us could think of.