From the moment that he started to fight off this purchase in court, it's needed a lot of mental gymnastics to defend the genius of his moves regarding the purchase of an underperforming social network.
Are these the plays of a proverbial multi-dimensional chess genius that are beyond mortal ken, or one clumsy attempt after another to salvage a bad situation that he put himself in?
In some other HN thread related to this, people worked out the math behind the layoff of half of Twitter's workforce days into taking over: assuming revenue remained the same, the company would be profitable enough to cover the loans taken to purchase (with itself as collateral!)
Actually, this is in line with the philosophy at Tesla's/Elon companies of "if you're not occasionally replacing components you deleted, then you aren't removing enough."
This article says they are trying to bring back "dozens" of employees. 3700 were fired. Of those apparently some were fired due to clerical error. What is there to explain?
There is a bunch of mass layoffs happening in other tech companies (and across the economy), are we going to pretend they will all go smoothly?
Actually come to think of it, without this acquisition Twitter would still have been forced to let a bunch of people go anyhow regardless of who happens to be the CEO. Possibly just as many. Probably with less severance... but definitely with nicer emails...
Dozens of employees, some of which may be essential to critical operations if they are in fact this desperate to get them back. If Twitter is down for 24 hours because they fired the three people that know the affected subsystem the best, the "it's only dozens out of 5700" proportion says nothing about actual business impact.
The other tech companies are still wildly profitable, Twitter is losing money. The severance is generous relative to company finances I'd say. Heck for some it is more than a Walmart greeter makes in a whole year actually working..
It varies. I’ve been a SpaceX (and thus Elon) fan since they were unsuccessfully launching Falcon 1’s. EM’s willingness to share information with the space fan community won him a lot of admirers. I was certainly willing to overlook many of his other failings as a result.
That’s become harder in the last few years and practically impossible in 2022. At this point, I am desperately hoping for SpaceX to get Starship/Superheavy flying before Elon manages to screw that up as well.
I’m not a trained psychiatric professional but it looks to me as if his extreme wealth and success has exacerbated some pre-existing tendencies and turned him into a (danger, medical jargon ahead) full-blown mess. It’s a shame to watch.
That's basically where I'm at. I don't dislike or resent Musk, although I can see why others do. I'm just disappointed in him. At a time when positive role models are needed, he's letting his self-destructive freak flag fly. He obviously isn't getting the therapeutic support that he (by his own admission) needs.
I'm sure some of us have parents or grandparents who worked for Howard Hughes back in the day, and are now feeling a strong sense of deja vu. Musk seems to be speedrunning Hughes' career and, really, his entire life.
Not much. His public feuding and conspiracy theory spreading is largely constrained to Twitter. The whole thing going under might be the best outcome for him. Presently, however, he’s acting like an addict given the crack store.
Endless announcements and mispredictions are what aggravates me the most, borderline fraud IMO. I am not so much disliking him for it, I think he's a little neurodivergent and it's not exactly his fault, but it makes me really sad there's never consequences and that so many people believe him again and again, it seems like there is some easily exploitable missing BS detector in a significant amount of the population.
He's a lot like Trump in that he jumps into everything declaring it simple and that he gets it unlike everyone else, then says it turns out this is more complicated than anyone thought.
I'm not sure what the "elon support" split on HN is, but in the past it seems to have been rather 50/50.
I suspect that HN has recently seemed more anti-elon because the anti-elon crowd has a lot of bullshit to point to recently, and the pro-elon crowd doesn't really have good defenses to most of it.
Most “pro-Elon” people who are not completely brainwashed have had lots of reasons to re-evaluate their opinion of him recently. People are not static and can have changing emotions.
I very much hope most everyone is anti billionaire-(for the time being)-manchilds-who-regularly-throws-tantrums-on-twitter-and-who-is-so-egomaniac-that-he-had-to-buy-the-title-founder-for-a-company-(which otherwise lives on government subsidies)-he-only-pumped-money-into-largely-seeded-by-daddy’s-emerald-mine.
There was tons of excitement over the years about his companies transforming the world and his successes there have been spectacular.
But over the past few years he’s become much more vocal about current events unrelated to his companies. He has every right to do it, but whether you’re a cable news commentator or Musk, the more you weigh in on social issues the more polarizing you become.
A man has to be full of great melancholies to accomplish what he has. This clearly has positive and negative sides. Judging from the accomplishments of great people throughout history you cannot have one without the other.
In the case of Twitter something had to be done. It was too powerful of a public forum and was mismanaged and run by extremists and exacerbated existing divisions, turning them into real rifts. If half a country feels they are being actively suppressed, demonized, and treated unfairly that is a recipe for disaster. Was Elon the guy to fix it? I dunno who else would be crazy enough to try. And his roots are in web tech so his experience may help.
What did he accomplish? Like personally he himself? There is a very specific agenda/propaganda to sell this hard-working, aspiring CEO image (well predating Musk) which I could never justify. They are just megalomaniac narcissists with an extraordinary luck (that is way too downplayed) and sometimes some redeeming quality at least (in the form of some charm, or leadership). Well, I couldn’t list any such for Elon here, but even if I could, why are we worshipping these people? They ain’t working 25 hours each day, the secret to their success is not that early morning yoga whatever and sleeping 2 hours in the office. As I mentioned, luck’s role is way downplayed. It is not too hard to make much money from already much money.
People are idolized, their accomplishments embellished, and their shortcomings overlooked when they are in positions of power and prestige. Often times the role of sheer luck, cronyism and connections are completely downplayed
Yeah fair enough, two sides to everything. Anecdotally I feel like I see a lot of Elon hate, but that could just be my decency bias due to Twitter drama and layoffs.
I'm seeing the same thing here on HN. People are frothing at the mouth to hate on him. Wild speculation all over.
Case in point, the HN trope that he is an idiot and doesn't know anything about technology and just takes credit for brilliant engineers' work. I laid out solid evidence that is not true, quoting top of the field scientist and engineers' assessment of his technical knowledge and skills. The only response I get is from RavingGoat (username kind of checks out) claiming Elon must have paid these people to say these things with no evidence whatsoever.
I personally can't wait for the high strung emotions on both sides to die out. There are people that actively cheer for Elon to fail and to take the entire company with him, and others that actively hope he's going to single-handedly restore free speech.
Meanwhile.. it's a corporation that trades in short messages between it's users. Is any of this really worth the emotional investment? It's an odd time in America, but casting all your hopes and dreams through the lens of what Elon Musk does today or where Twitter is tomorrow seems to me to be the worst way to approach it.
“This is why Elon is a genius for keeping these employees on staff for 3 months instead of laying them off; now he can just get them back to work or they refuse and he saves 3 months of salary!”
Tuning a guitar string often involves going too low and then raising back up to the right note. Disruptive to the workers, but Musk is tuning a guitar not running a daycare - requirements and concerns are different. I’m sure he’s less worried about the optics of correction than you are. Add your own value judgements accordingly.
Personally I can’t make myself see this as a humanitarian disaster — these employees have known the risk was on the horizon for many months, are eminently employable, high-functioning, with presumably good professional networks and resumes. They’ll land on their feet, and have themselves to blame if they didn’t prepare accordingly. Plenty of other drama in the world to worry about, much of it more severe than ex-twitter ee’s on the open job market thirsty for talent.
Elon is an intense narcissist so he absolutely cares how bad it looks. I am more worried about the workers who are still stuck there rather than the ones who were let go. It will be total chaos for quite awhile there before it settles into whatever former shell of itself , stuffed with ads and sponsored scams, it's on track to become, a depressing place to work for anyone with a conscience.
I mean yeah some reorganizations were probably needed, but he seems to take a shotgun approach to it. Fire half the people, whip the leftovers into making a new feature to be done within days, shun the actual people using the platform by removing their verification, demanding payment, and having them banned anyway when they cause him butthurt, etc.
He could've done all that much more smoothly. Now though, Twitter is spiraling.
" the focus on the customer.... is uncannily similar."
what is he smoking? Musk literally banned the head of a major advertising organization concerned about where Musk was taking the site in terms of it being friendly to advertising (https://www.axios.com/2022/11/06/musk-twitter-marketers-adve...). Read Josh Marshall's thread at https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1588679838306799617. Musk is absolutely doing everything the customer does not want (the customer being: advertisers), and they have already ran for the exits.
The pro-Elon redpill here is that he's already had at least 4 unambiguously successful companies (zip2, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX). So maybe we are just observing what it takes to be extremely successful: Move fast and break stuff. If you want to be a multibillionaire you're going to have to make a lot of big mistakes, faster than anyone thinks possible.
Additionally I think "verified users get priority in replies" has the potential to be absolutely killer. Everyone knows that clout chasing is huge on Twitter. I could easily see a spiral like so:
* Initially 5% of daily actives buy the check marks, mostly just to own the libs (Fox News loves Elon btw). But the newborn blue checks are everywhere in replies. They're accumulating followers like no tomorrow.
* Others begin to follow suit. $8/month is a small price to pay for clout. Remember, that's what they're all there for. "If anyone tells you they don't want more twitter followers, they're lying."
* 10% of the userbase has bought a blue check. 20%. The anti-Elon folks are holding out. But their voices are growing quieter and quieter.
* The entire tenor of the site begins to change. The loudest voices are the Elon fans who bought the check mark early. His politics become dominant on the site.
* Eventually the anti-Elon folks either ragequit or end up purchasing the checkmark. Petty tyranny and clout chasing are kind of their thing. It's a case of irresistible force meets immovable object. Endgame seems hard to predict.
You missed one:
* Russia buys Blue for all of their Twitter bot-farms, giving Twitter tons of extra income, and Russia even better influence over US voters.
$8 should be plenty sufficient to cover some sort of identity verification service -- assuming possession of a distinct US credit card number isn't sufficient on its own. (Could make it so if you mouse over a checkmark, it displays a flag based on what country the payment for the account originates from.)
Additionally, I don't believe bot detection is an inherently hard problem. And if every bot detected means the bot creator has to pay another $8 for their next bot, then bot detection becomes profitable for Twitter.
I doubt this ends up being the cheapest way for Russia to influence US elections.
Did you see how hard Elon tried to get out of the Twitter deal? Remember how he made up fake excuses about bots to try and torpedo the merger? Even Elon doesn't think Elon can make the Twitter deal work.
We don't know for sure that's why he tried to get out of the deal. Maybe he decided he actually wanted to focus on Tesla/SpaceX, or was trying to gain leverage for a lower acquisition price.
If he didn't think he could improve on the status quo for Twitter, the thing to do would be to trim as much staff as possible to cut costs and then continue with the current ad revenue based model, without making any changes or introducing new features. Twitter was making on the order of $5B/year in ad revenue. Pushing costs below $5B/year should not be difficult given the nature of the service provided.
Alternatively, if what you say is true and he doesn't think he can make it work, he could try to "back out" by flipping Twitter to another buyer, or just take it public again. Revealed preferences suggest he thinks he can outperform those alternatives.
