Purposefully didn't focus on "whose fault it is". A long chain of bad decisions led to this situation. Twitter's board shares a fair amount of the blame too, for example. So does Jack Dorsey for not giving twitter much attention during his reign as CEO.

The board succeeded in selling the company and returning value to investors. I think they did their job.

I made bank off the deal, very pleased that Elon is such an idiot

The board did their job perfectly!

Wait, why does Jack Dorsey deserve blame? He took a failing company and conned an idiot into paying 2.5x market value for it. Measured by shareholder value, he's one of the most brilliant CEOs in history.

He deserves a lot of blame for not standing up for his former team when they were treated so poorly during the transition.

Firing people is normal. Doing it in an arbitrarily cruel way is not.

What could he have done?

The company was taken private and the new owner started burning the place down to rebuild it in the image of a golden cow or something.

I guess he could have tweeted for mercy.

the team was paid salary for the term of their contributions PLUS severance. let’s also add proceeds from the stock sale.

are you really saying they’re owed something more by the owners of the company?

Looks like they only ended up with one month pay as severance. Not great… Source: https://fortune.com/2023/01/07/twitter-employees-laid-off-el...

15 years ago it wasn't clear whether Facebook or Twitter was going to be the winner (or if they'd both just be another MySpace).

Jack is responsible for Twitter losing.

It always felt like Twitter co didn't actually understand what Twitter was and almost all of the product innovation came from the community rather than twitter itself.

Twitter's only failure is that it never returned a profit. When you look at the social landscape, it's hard to argue anyone has succeeded other than Facebook.

Twitter's product is great and it didn't need to be as large as Facebook. It shouldn't need to twist itself for the greatest common denominator users who required immediate gratification via algorithmic feeds and short memes.

> When you look at the social landscape, it's hard to argue anyone has succeeded other than Facebook.

YouTube and TikTok seem to be doing alright.

Twitch and Snap too.

TikTok is private, but is said to be losing money. Snap is in the same boat as Twitter as being largely unprofitable. It is unclear if Twitch is profitable either.

Twitter definitely punched above its weight as the go-to forum for companies, politicians, celebrities, media, etc.

Or conversely, as the go-to forum for companies, politicians, etc., Twitter punched well below its weight for generating revenue.

Dorsey retained his stake in the company -- he apparently believed in musk at least far enough to stay invested.