https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=twitter&hl...
It's having a downturn, but in the big picture, it's business as usual.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Edit: I am perfectly aware that Google Trends is not a perfect metric. My point is more broadly that claims of "dying" are anecdotal and exaggerated. Advertisers leaving a service also doesn't count as "dying."
It might, perhaps, almost be that a google trends graph isn't a reliable measure of business sustainability.
Twitter was only profitable for one year while it was public (2018). It's not like Elon could make that much worse. For what it's worth, he claims (edit: claimed before the advertisers left) it's break-even now.
As for competing services, Facebook has their work cut out for them. Active Daily User count on Threads has gone down 70% from it's bombastic launch. Average user engagement time has also gone down to 4 minutes from 19.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/threads-user-engagement-continu...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/willskipworth/2023/07/21/thread...
Musk is swimming upstream, having notched the top-tick LBO of a decade-long ZIRP run.
With Twitter's original finances, in a strong economy, the debt would have been difficult. As currently configured, with ad revenue down 50% [1], it's obviously unsustainable, a reality reflected in its bonds' prices.
> he claims it's break-even now
Musk expected, last year, Twitter to break even this year [2]. He claimed break-even in April, but conceded profitability was still away [3], implying an unlevered definition of breaking even, i.e. before financing costs.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-twitters-c...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-expects-twitter...
[3] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-twitter-is-opera...
It is not, and will not be the point for Elon - he's clearly stated he does not care about money. There are goals beyond what the petty populace panders or bitches about. So again, your argument - while well formulated, is insignificant if the short-term losses support long-term heading changes.
What's your take on Amazon?
Which are? And I'm asking about Twitter specifically not Tesla or SpaceX.
- Maximize user-minute happiness
- Make Twitter a source of timely truth
Amazon isn't levered to the hilt. It can choose its own time frames.
Leverage enforces an external horizon. It's unlikely Musk loses control of Twitter in bankruptcy--nobody wants it. But even if he "does not care about money," which is obviously untrue, he structures for himself and responds to monetary incentives, his lenders (and advertisers and employees and minority shareholders) do, and that's operational chaos for potentially months on end that adds zero value to Twitter or his brand.
That's like saying that because a company is profitable there is no room for improvement. There is a big difference between making $1 a year and making $1 billion a year, and same that there is a big difference between losing $1 a year and losing $1 billion a year.
It can absolutely get worse than running roughly break-even. If you have $4b in revenue and $4b in operating costs, and your lose half your revenue, you now have a hole that gets $2b deeper every year.
On top of that, the buyout added a $13b loan which has an annual minimum cost of $1b.
So he needs to increase profitability by a quarter of their previous annual revenue just to get back to where Twitter was pre-buyout.
As if this scale were merely binary rather than a continuum.
To be fair he could. Even ignoring everything else the interest alone on the debt alone he offloaded to Twitter during the acquisition is enough to finance the payroll of at least 1000-2000 additional employees (assuming total 600-300k cost per person and only 5% interest..). Which is why he had to fire so many people.
To say that "Elon has no doubt pissed off [...] some advertisers" is such a hilarious understatement.
Also: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1680082007873953794
I'm not disagreeing with your point just nitpicking word choice; the best kind of annoying comment!
Maybe he just wants to build WeChat ultimately to be sold to the US government, in the same vain as with his other ventures where he runs on government subsidies and/or full-on privatization mandates.
Again, extrapolate mid/long-term with “new” Republicans (don’t care about small gov at this point) potentially winning next election(s) and him providing an “AI” enabled personal interface for every US citizen… what could go wrong?
It’s a natural sell / setup for “we must win against evil empire of China, be as efficient, yaddayadda”.
The only question left at this point is how soon.
Pre-Elon, you have financial statements showing the strength of the company. Profitable before Covid before they hired a massive number of people (like a lot of companies during covid) and then dropped below profitability. It's very possible that a smaller layoff and a focus on fundamentals could have brought them back to profitability.
Elon has admitted that they've lost around 50% in ad revenue since the takeover and that they're not cash-flow positive. Reports are saying 59%-70%. I'm inclined to believe that Elon is under reporting to the public (based on his history of exaggerating/under-reporting/lying about this kind of stuff). Either way, it's clear Twitter is in a much weaker position now than pre-takeover.
Maybe the lawyers and landlords will take payment in blue checks.
It's been 30 full years of questionable debt-dependant business models.
My own account is still in a banned state for telling Microsoft they suck for making their OS bloated. Before I was off twitter, because fuck deleting a reasonable tweet to appease some censorship bot and its review team, twitter was less and less 'free' for anyone not worshiping that rich ass-hat.
So while Twitter is indeed a toxic hellhole, it is oftentimes the only way you can directly attempt to communicate with "the right people" in an organization.
they even censored the president of your country but no Musk is the evil lol. Somehow I can understand that the average joe is deep into politics and biased because they want their team to win but in HN, between engineers, that like facts and concepts that are abstract can't we just say that censoring the POTUS was something unseen in any kind of social media platform and that was probably the biggest event that ever happened? whatever we think of the guy, he got trough where he was through the voices of millions of american and just banning those is a danger to freedom and democracy
You have to view these billionaires as toddlers. They never hear a simple “no”, and when they do they go apoplectic.
None of this should ever apply to any even moderately-adjusted individual beyond childhood. Certainly not as an adult.
I think it's a relatively universal human trait to resent dissent, these guys just have more resources to make their distate known.
Most people when they hear “no” feel a little upset and get over it.
When a narcissist hears “no” he suffers a narcissistic injury and seeks revenge.
When a narcissistic billionaire hears “no”… well, buckle up. 1/6 showed us how bad that can get.
Which is also the story of Twitter and Musk.
I think it didn't even scratch the surface of how bad it can get. But it was already plenty bad.
Just saying yes as a parent doesn’t help them learn to cope with it. Rather a close similarity to GP’s point!
A few times a day.
> I find it pretty common to get a visceral reaction when I disagree with people,
I only find this common with people who are very sensitive (not that there is anything at all wrong with that). An interesting corollary I've found as well: very sensitive people tend to think the rest of the normal world is equally as sensitive (something I've picked up from having a very sensitive partner for over 5 years now; a partner who has many very sensitive friends); they somehow seem to forget that countries like Germany have people that are super direct as the norm.
> I think it's a relatively universal human trait to resent dissent
I hear far "worse" from good friends on the spectrum or from Germany or Russia and it's rather easy to chalk it up to them just communicating in a different way.
One they are billionaires, hearing no is likely exceedingly rare, however to get to prestige, I'm certain they heard no many many times (or the equivalent, say "no way you can do that") so they're so used to people objecting and they succeed anyway - Tesla, SpaceX come to mind here - that no just makes them want to double down on what they're doing, combined with the fact that their inner circle at this point likely isn't saying no very often, if at all, directly to the person at hand, it makes them very resistant to real feedback
It doesn't have to be just billionaires, one of the startups I worked in had a leadership culture like this. I ended up leaving after the new person I was reporting to took this to an extreme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com
It looks like this isn't a rebranding so much as making an "everything app".
> On October 4, 2022, Elon Musk described his acquisition of Twitter as "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app".[28] This has been linked to x.com.[29] In conversation with Ron Baron a month later, Musk said he will execute the X product plan "with some improvements" which will make Twitter "the most valuable financial institution in the world."[30]
Well, it'll be interesting whether he succeeds or fails. But this does not look like it is impulsive.
A rebranding would make more sense at the point where you actually roll out those everything features. Him being a marketing engineer, I guess he just had to stay in the conversation this week.
those who are already looking at him skeptically will not care and were already on the way out / not using the app.
dumb, but riding the hype train is really his only play IMO.
The impulsiveness and crowd sourcing writes the headline itself.
I’m not implying it’s a super calculated masterplan, more that he just knows it’ll grab headlines and mindshare cheaper than any paid marketing launch ever could.
Elon's company merged with Confinity. Confinity was already well underway with PayPal (owned trademarks, patents, and the domain name) at the time of the merger, and notably, had a working MVP.
Notably because when Elon was initially selected as CEO, he spent his tenure trying to throw away this working MVP because it was written in Java on Solaris, which he didn't know, so he wanted it rewritten in Classic ASP so he could better understand the codebase.
A few months (four, IIRC) of stubbornness about that, and the board had had enough, and removed him as the CEO.
Believe it or not, with all that being said, it still looks like it is impulsive.
Years ago I remember reading something about the Chinese microblogging sites and it was mentioned "these sites also have a character limits. However, b/c in Chinese a character can be an entire word, the 'word limits' are much longer."
Moving to the 4000 character limit feels very much a response to the above.
What exactly is it meant for then if not serious discussion?
> We have blogs for that.
You mean the one sided discussions? Also not every thought is worthy of a blog post, but is worthy of being put out there.
> Nobody wants to read it for an interesting article about geopolitics- foreignaffairs.com already exists
Geopolitics isn't the only thing longer convos are for... The problem with pre-Musk/4000 char limit Twitter is that nuances are heavily lost because of the lack of characters and that nobody wants to do thread storms.
> Know your audience.
Ironic.
All other types of discussion. Promoting serious discussion elsewhere.
Whether or not that was what the platform was meant for, it was what it was. And as far as I heard, our country was not the only one where this was happening.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2017/Giving-yo...
They made Unicode code points below U+1100 count as 1/280 of the character limit, and code points above it count as 1/140 of the character limit.
Where's the data? What's the warrant?
Do these arguments not recognize the ability to self-curate the content they see on the platform? It's entirely possible to individually remove and/or add follows. Block people. Mute people. Report violative content. Contribute enough and get into community notes. "Be the change," rather than just "whine about it" is probably the only useful pathway.
I'm squarely in the Capitalism + Elon Musk == good thing camp. Haven't seen a convincing reason to change my mind yet, and I'm the most apt to hate billionaires. Even the "Elon is WEF, he's not your friend" crowd have some compelling ad homininominons I'm too impressed to consider.
Then again, I'm a fuckin' nobody with negative net worth, so economically and capitalistically speaking perhaps I am guilty of idolization. But logically some of the arguments are out of my ability to understand. Emotional arguments don't work nor resonate with me.
The problem is that there is a clash between what users want to see and what the company's algorithm wants you to see, and it seems like there's strong evidence to conclude that Musk and his platform are trying to push the kinds of things that a lot of people don't want to see.
So yes, you can spend the time and energy to self-curate and find people who have interesting opinions. I could also go to a white supremacist march and find people who have interesting things to say about classic Dr Who episodes or who have the same passion for Dungeons and Dragons as I do, but I'm not going to tolerate all that toxic crazy to find them when I can go literally anywhere else. In the end, you're still stuck in a cesspool trying to filter out the content that Twitter really, really wants you to see. If I have to work at not seeing the stuff I've explicitly chosen to see, I'm going to find anywhere else (or nowhere).
> due to extreme unreflected and unchecked ego
Unfortunately, I think it's worse than that. My belief is that it's manic phases caused by bipolar disorder. If you squint and chart these 'manic' decisions, it seems to be about every 4-5 months. In between he'll often (though not always) post some self-reflective and more 'down' things and be generally more quiet (remember the diet-coke and gun pics?). Then, like with many bipolar sufferers, he'll get 'manic' again and do these kinda things to his businesses and to those around him who care. His personal life is famously a mess.
I want to be clear, I'm not a shrink, I have no degrees in this, and I'm 'diagnosing' this very far removed from the guy. But I do have a few bipolar people in my life and, to me, the parallels are very striking.
I feel for him in that way. Despite all the money and fame, the disease that I suspect he suffers from (with, again, low evidence) is a very tough one to accept. Of the people in my own life that suffer from it, none have moved past a confirmed diagnosis and started the long road to recovery and acceptance.
Does it seem like manic? Yes. But when this behavior is persistent, not sure bipolar is the diagnosis per se.
> Sunday, on Twitter, Musk was also asked if he was bipolar, to which Musk replied, “yeah,” but then he explained further, saying his psychological highs and lows are associated with actual ups and downs in his life.
> “Maybe not medically tho,” says his tweet. “Dunno. Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe real problem is getting carried away in what I sign up for.”
https://sports.yahoo.com/entertainment/elon-musk-tweeted-bip...
Mixed episodes are no joke, I've experienced a couple and hope to never do so again.
We’re not morally responsible for the fact some of us may have mental disorders (some like OCD which I have won’t leave us entirely), so stealing which we would be morally responsible for is worse than having a mental disorder.
However, having a mental disorder would be worse than stealing in terms of its consequences (we just can’t get rid of it no matter how much we try).
(At least I think it makes sense to accept both of your statements that way since I think having a large ego is morally bad independently of any consequences.)
I think that Mr. Musk is an undiluted asshole and one of the worst douchebags to ever grace our planet, which he has proven again and again.
But analyzing his mental condition is sure as shit not up to me or to anybody else.
After all, he proved again and again what a sad excuse of a human being he is.
But I don't think it's OK to judge his mental state as an outsider.
Curious; not trying to bust your balls.
Why not? Am I unallowed to suggest that Howard Hughes had OCD? That Kurt Gödel was paranoid?
Submitting a hypothesis about some’s mental condition is a reasonable thing to do, given that you have a substantial body of evidence in the form of behavioural reports.
I don’t find the above argument convincing, but only because it’s vague and lacks specific examples - not because it’s ”not okay.”
I don't like Musk, nor do I trust the things he says, but I usually err on the side of granting people some humanity.
Cool your jets, man!
Musk has done plenty of good, for the country and the world. I can think of plenty, plenty others who have accomplished nothing but feel entitled to run other peoples' lives.
This is projection and what Twitter was explicitly doing with the Trust and Safety org. It was protecting the elite from free speech. Elon dismantled that.
It also might have been an impulsive decision to become relevant in “new tech” at the same time (why would he care so much about this, boredom?). Ultimately he probably just wanted to get out of that impulsive deal again though but it was too late.
Lastly he probably also had/has some WeChat ambitions.
We can see how most of these potential goals are now falling apart spectacularly due to extreme unreflected and unchecked ego.
He seems to have succeeded in the first case though, the “moderated”/“mostly sane”(?) free speech “town square” basically destroyed and replaced by an increasingly irrelevant echo chamber for his greater brand.