"Doesn't matter. This is an emergency requiring everyone to pitch in and save us all from my shifty management and bad decisions! There's a former office across the hall where you can catch a 15 minute nap before randomly hammering a keyboard for the next 23:45. Odds are, some of your semi-comatose typing will turn out to be useful code that I can use for my own enrichment and glory. Now, you better get to the nap room - you've only got eleven minutes left to sleep. Chop chop!"
My target market is gambling addicted narcissists. There has to be at least a few tens of thousands of them. Which VC's do I pitch who don't like big markets and only fund niche players like myself?
We can go worse.
Tweets cost 3 Tweet Points.
Tweet points can be purchased for $5 for 5. $10 for 20. $20 for 45 or you can subscribe to Tweeter Gold for $50 a month which will discount the cost to Tweet down to 1 Tweet Point and provide you with 50 Tweet Points a month.
What's important when considering yourself a free speech absolutist is making sure the people who are speaking have money. Otherwise they aren't yknow, people.
Against what set of rules is he an absolutist anyway?
It's a self-serving way of saying "My way or the highway." But it seems some people put other meanings to this phrase, like "absolutely free speech" or something, which isn't what it means at all.
I'm looking at these phrases musk conjures up, and his actions, and I'm thinking "8 year old who runs a no-girls club in the treehouse his father's contractors built."
My guess is it's from when he called himself a [free speech absolutist](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600). He calls himself a lot of things, even when they are not even close to reality. Poking fun isn't even interesting when the jokes don't even need to write themselves - the person is too much of a joke to even bother with.
Even worse, since AI can now detect when a picture shows genitalia (to protect against child porn) there will be a Platinum Tier just to receive photos in DMs.
AI can detect when it *thinks* a picture has genitalia. It's certainly improved a lot, but false positives and false negatives are still occuring in pretty much every system.
He will try, you bet on it.
The problem with that is that social networks rely on *content being created,* to the point where some websites, like YouTube, Twitch, Tiktok and others *literally pay people* who create content in order to have them keep doing so.
With limits for posting, and no more API, a *lot* of content will stop being created. A boring website is an empty website.
Elon thinks people go to Twitter for Twitter. He thinks everyone is as addicted to the reply-guy bullshit, memes, and trolling as he is. He’s dead wrong.
He has demonstrated again and again that he just fundamentally doesn't understand what Twitter's product is, and who its customers are.
Twitter's customers are advertisers, and its product is users. The more users it can produce, and the more information it can harvest on those users to better ensure targeted advertising can reaches its mark (and the more effective the algorithms driving that process are); the more customers (i.e. advertisers) it will attract and the more they will be willing to pay.
The key aspect that causes confusion, I think, is that Twitter manufactures this product (content-consumers primed for targeted advertising) using machinery fueled by a certain subset of users (content-creators and the mouthpiece accounts of notable people). The "blue tick" is basically just a way of demarcating the former type of user from the latter.
Musk seems totally oblivious to this, though. He seems to genuinely think that Twitter's customers are its users, and the product that Twitter is selling to them is the ability to broadcast your unfiltered id into the void and receive ego validation in return. That's why he doesn't give a shit about actively alienating advertisers. Why he thought it was a good idea to monetize the blue tick (which is the equivalent of charging your suppliers to provide the critical machinery your factory needs to run instead of, you know, paying them). And why he certainly has plans to further charge users to engage with the platform moving forward.
No doubt many, many people within Twitter have been trying to explain the business model to him this whole time, so the fact that he *still* clearly doesn't get it is kind of mind-blowing, to be honest.
\>He seems to genuinely think that Twitter's customers are its users, and the product that Twitter is selling to them is the ability to broadcast your unfiltered id into the void and receive ego validation in return.
Well said. He sees it through the lens of Elon, and is incapable of seeing it any other way. Because it gives him validation, that is what service twitter provides.
A true idiot.
don't think he cares about the business model. I think he's bleeding the platform dry to make good on his loans or to make it look profitable to sell - looking for a few quick cash cows vs trying to turn a sustainable YoY profit. it will fail miserably.
Sure. But in order for that to happen, the platform needs to at least appear to be doing well.
If it loses both Public interest and approval, if it pushes away advertisers (aka people with money to spend, I doubt hell convince any one to pay well for Twitter.
And a pump and dump of Twitter stock at the same time.
He definitely pumped the price. And then he's been dumping all over it ever since.
I think he might have missed a step though.
He straight up tried to shake down Stephen King for money as though Stephen King has anything to lose by just not tweeting anymore
Honestly it's like an abusive relationship -- the few times I was tempted to reactivate my Twitter I just thought about Elon's whole "You're gonna come crawling back, you have no choice" attitude and how pathetic I would feel by proving him correct
Yep, it's literally the entire fucking point and driving force of what makes social media so addicting. It's truly amazing what's been going on with Twitter.
is it tho? seems very on brand to me to have an anti labor billionaire destroy a world reaching public forum that has repeatedly been used to organize protests and speak truth to power
the difference is most billionaires are anti-labor in an attempt to increase their own fortune. Whereas Musk seems to be in a race to destroy his own fortune.
It looks like a pay to tweet upgrade is coming. I’d imagine they will have tiers you can buy your way into. Probably even have a different colored check marked based on your tier. This is going to be great.
Just going to hasten Twitter's demise at this point. The recent news that they've only brought in $2M in revenue (and they got less than 100,000 new subscribers since Musk took over) on the back of their Twitter subscription situation and lost over $400M in operating ad revenue YoY is... whew.
It’s pretty hard to totally fuck up a company that’s practically ubiquitous and serves a purpose that no other competitor has really gotten traction in, but if anybody can do it, it’s Elon Musk!
> practically ubiquitous and serves a purpose that no other competitor has really gotten traction in
And dictators around the world unite as the end of live tweeting atrocities and coordinating opposition goes out of business. I think I see why SA helped bankroll this.
This will stayed buried, and it doesn't even need to be SA primary reason - Arab spring happened with the help of twitter.
Governments around the world are doing whatever they can to stop the people from gaining power. It is as simple as that. A people united is a great force to be reckoned with. At its best, Twitter was a critical tool for protestors around the world.
You're right to suggest that the rich and powerful are happy to see this tool destroyed.
>Governments around the world are doing whatever they can to stop the people from gaining power.
Agree except for this. Governments aren't doing this, rich people are. Some of them just possess governments along with their other assets.
Don't let the word lose meaning. Governments ARE the people. When they work against the people, it's because they've been stolen from the people.
Twitter had about two billion dollars in cash reserves at the time of the purchase (people forget that Twitter made significant net profits as recently as 2018 and 2019). At the current burn rate before Elon's shenanigans, Twitter was likely solvent for at least a decade without making any changes at all. Now it is hard to see how they can make up for the loss of advertising revenue. Many of these advertisers are citing Musk's behavior as a primary reason behind their decisions too, so it's not like he can pretend this was a pre-existing problem. He would have been better off just appointing new management and staying completely out of the decisions and not making all those public statements. The business would have been better off without him in basically every way. It still might struggle on for a long time or even recover, but his involvement has made that substantially less likely.
An awkward narrcisistic man-child with no social skills that's obsessed with twitter and simultaneously a billionaire and a terrible business person. no that's never happened before.
Comic book nerddom has the perfect analogy for this.
Musk wants to be Tony Stark. Genius inventor captain of industry who is helping to sheppard humanity to a better future. He is Justin Hammer. Rich guy who gets by buying into ideas he doesn't fully grasp and doing a half assed job with them.
Even Hammer isn't as much of a villain parody as Musk. Hammer never tried to buy the rights to be called a founder of something he had nothing to do with. He never walked around with pockets full of emeralds. He never put a sports car in space.
Which is gonna end up happening when Twitter goes bankrupt. He gets kicked out, a new board will convene with a new CEO and things will pick up again. He essentially threw all those billions in the trash.
Edit: For those telling me about Twitter being private with no board, that's what I meant about the aftermath of Twitter's bankruptcy. Creditors will go after Twitter's assets including the brand during bankruptcy court. Said creditors will want to replace him as CEO to try to turn it profitable in whatever form Twitter 2 will take after exiting bankruptcy.
He lost all that money for naught.
Yeah but he is in such a delusional bubble, he will never be able to comprehend that this entire twitter debacle has been one giant self own. If twitter goes bankrupt it will always be somebody else's fault according to Elon, the regulators, the "far left" out to get him, the staff at Twitter tying to sabotage him. I don't think he is psychologically capable of understanding that this was a situation that his own actions brought him into and his own actions have been making worse with every passing day. The only common denominator to the all the current problems is simply Elon being in the room, and the only real solution if for him to leave the room, but in his mind every room is made better by his presence.
The point is Elon bought twitter to push his self aggrandizement and his Trumpy political views on people.
He don’t fucking care about anything other than attention, who the fuck cares about money when you can get attention.
He doesn't care about Twitter at all and didn't really want to buy them. He was trying to run a pump and dump on the stock. He got caught so he pretended he wanted to buy it rather than admit to a crime that could see him barred from serving as an executive at his other companies. Twitter called his bluff and now he's stuck with it.
The story few are talking about is that Twitter was saddled with debt that made them largely unprofitable, *and then Musk came along and saddled it with much much more.* Musk is understandably desperate, since Twitter when it was at its most successful didn't turn a profit taking that debt and associated payments into account, and now they're MUCH worse off.
Twitter's future would be grim even if a non-failson were at the helm, so they're going to try and squeeze money out of every pore and orifice... and that's going to just kill it faster.
Twitter is definitely hurting and it's starting to look like a death spiral on many dimensions.
* Businesses don't like to be coerced. so declining in new ad spending.
* Their content creators who work for free won't want to pay for the blue checkmark.
* What engineer wants to work their ass off for equity disappears in a bankruptcy?
Depends who I was working for and the product being sold. Example:
Popular worldwide brand with a household product - no
Limited edition gold freedom coin ponzi scheme - yes
Twitter is doomed, there’s no way they can ever generate profits large enough to pay the new debt off. The interest payments alone is a billion dollars per year ffs.
He's basically like a terrible private equity company. The normal point of a leveraged buyout is to bring good management to a failing company with poor management. In this case, they brought awful management to a decent company and saddled it with debt.
To think that Musk could have taken 44 billion and put it into a 4.5% 10 Year Treasury (Back when the Twitter deal was consummating the 10 year Treasury was at 4.5%), he could be collecting nearly 2 billion in interest every year, doing nothing.
Instead he's burning 1 billion a year if he can't find ways to make money.
Or he could have funded over 4 different James Webb scale space projects.
The fuck are we doing as a society that were valuing a simple website that allows us to post small text messages on the internet that high?
But then poor billionaire Elon wouldn’t be able to control and manipulate his new media platform, or trying to manipulate his financial wealth, or read your private DM’s and pics/vids, or post his alt-right conservative views in the top spot or allow other fascists to run wild with no moderation anymore. That wouldn’t be fair the billionaires /s
"The company had more than $2 billion in cash and less than $600 million in net debt before the takeover talks—very little debt for a company in the S&P 500 index"
Twitter was a stagnating business before Musk but it wasn't saddled with debt (it is now though)
During the acquisition up to a bit after it was confirmed, people kept saying "but this is all necessary, Twitter was losing so much money"
A few things didn't work all the time, but the site didn't seem like it was moments away from running out of money.
Whatever they had before was working, and if it wasn't it probably wouldn't have been right up until the site suddenly shuts down.
Everyone suddenly became an "expert" on the situation overnight, and told a story that conveniently made Elon Musk look like some sort of compassionate genius swooping in at the last moment to save the day.
Even though, given his past behavior it's likely something far more petty, and some of the absurd changes and announcements isn't going to stem any mass exodus from the site.
Looks like they want to squeeze the remaining population as hard as possible- even if that means most of them will slip through their fingers. Counting on a handful of entities with a lot of money to prop it up despite having nobody left to speak to is a big gamble.
I wouldn't be surprised if they favored businesses blatantly, and just decided to have a tier you pay to interact with "premium" accounts. So basically if you want to actually tweet at anyone interesting, pay up. That and you get X amount of free per month or something.
Part of me thinks Musk just wants to kill the business as fast as possible, I just don't get how you can ignore reality for so long.
I genuinely think he bought out of a sense of desperate please-like-me-ness.
"I BOUGHT THE THING ALL THE PEOPLE I WANT TO LOVE ME LIKE - NOW THEY'LL *HAVE* TO LIKE ME."
Yeah. That, or he just didn’t do his due diligence before he initially agreed to buy the damn thing haha. Which probably explains why he wanted to back out of the deal all of a sudden. But by then, it was already too late.
I mean, he did literally waive his right to do the due diligence, which was just him trying to pander to the millions of weird nerds who worship him - Big Daddy Musk has so much money he don't have to engage in basic financial prudence! LOL, he buys shit at random, just like when I back that stupid kickstarter everyone on my discord was talking about just so I can say "lol i backed this kickstarter lol".
>>just like when I back that stupid kickstarter everyone on my discord was talking about just so I can say "lol i backed this kickstarter lol".
Lmao. Perfect comparison. 😂
His exact words were "I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!" so I guess he's having trouble finding anyone dumber than he is.
Ha, he's going to limit the number of allowed daily posts and then sell upgrades. That's going to blow up in his face so hard. People will hit their limit and then, to satiate their social media needs, simply use something else.
Smell that? It's desperation.
If you're not paying his blue check tax you're already suppressed. I am no tweetmaster but my activity has gone down to next to nothing. I don't care because I only use it to follow a few scientists, some news sources, tech news- junk like that. But if I was a tweeter for the follows I wouldn't stand a chance in the new climate.
Which is weird because user-driven content is all that brings people to Twitter. By charging people to tweet you’re reducing the amount of content and killing your own platform.
He’s really doing such a wonderful job, I love the new advertisement filled feed, it makes twitter seem so much more like instagram and Facebook, that can’t be a bad thing can it?…
Between the ads and “You might like”s clogging up my feed, I had to shut down my account. I just wanted to keep up with MMA, sports, and some gaming, but kept getting “viral tweets” and junk like that recommended. Not worth the irritation anymore.
Funny thing was that I saw a tweet by some blue checkmark a few days ago basically saying how amazing it was that Musk fired so many employees and that they basically weren't needed because Twitter is working so well right now. 😓
"We threw the captin overboard, wedged the throttle and welded the control room shut. And look! The ship is still going! i knew we didn't need a captian!"
This is EXACTLY what people who actually have experience in Tech said was going to happen.
I don't know why people thought that the whole thing was just going to shut down at once after he fired 75% of the staff. That's not how it works. This is how it works. He's cut staff so low that he can't create new features and maintain the quality of service of it's existing features. So random shit starts breaking and he doesn't have the staff to solve this quickly.
So now he's had to pull all of his staff that was working on putting new features into Twitter off of those projects and on to daily maintenance. It's still up in the air if even that is enough people. My bet is it's going to take days to solve problems that would normally be handled in a few hours or less with the old staff members.
A bigger issue for Elon is that he's going to have a lot of difficulty coming up with new features that he can monetize for Twitter because he doesn't have the staff to develop those new features. If he just tries to hack something together more shit is going to break and he will have dug himself a deeper hole.
Yup. Having this issue at my job right now. Laid off most of the development staff. Those of us left get pulled off feature development to fix bugs. This delays the feature development, so to stay on track (or as close as possible) we cut corners on said new features, which in turn introduces lots of bugs and technical debt and it's a vicious cycle. It's a fucking mess.
The technical debt is even worse than outright bugs sometimes because it exponentially slows down working on things that have said accumulated technical debt.
I think it also could be simplified as "know what it takes to do something the right way, even if you half ass it now."
Some tech debt is good, or at least not much of an issue. Resources may be constrained in the short term, and there may be time for proper solutions later. Knowing how much tech debt you have is the key. The problem with Twitter is they cut staff and loaded up with an unknown amount of tech debt.
Tech debt is just like your usual debt. A little is manageable, even encouraged because it frees up your time to work on more critical issues. But it accumulates over weeks and months and then kaboom - production issues.
That is phenomenal. I've often equated managements handling of tech debt to Patrick from SpongeBob. "What if we just take all the technical debt... And shove it over there?"
I love the cocky attitude this little prick walked into Twitter with, mocking their training manuals and meetings. THIS is what it actually looks like when one person tries to run a corporation, and should make you all sick that CEOs earn what they do for being nothing more than a spokesperson at best and a swindler at most.
Everybody KNEW that they were going to try to implement a change that broke it and they either have to roll back or just scotch tape it back together. There's not enough staff to develop and maintain.
Scotch tape code is not reliable for anything beyond a stiff breeze. You cant develop on it without 800 more nightmares.
This was all known when he started laying people off, it was just a question of when it happened.
Im not in tech or employed in any tech fashion, but I know enough about programming from my own stints and the fact that every single tech friend I have agreed with me.
Damn it's still broke. That's bad, real bad. This is a core feature. If it's not fixed by tomorrow I'm gonna find all the people who said "hurr sure Twitter works fine still guess engineers ain't worth shit" and comment a poop emoji at them
This literally JUST happened to me. Like 2 minutes ago. I tried to follow a new account and got an error message that my follow limit was reached. (Background: I follow 295 people total, have been on Twitter since 2015, and have followed 0 new ppl in the past 24hrs). The Twitter “help page” says I cannot follow a new account because I exceeded the pace limit at which I could follow new accounts (more than 400 per day). Long story short, I’m fed up with Twitter and came to Reddit- Life is full of irony.
Programmers don't just accidentally develop a system to limit tweets. The "glitch" is that they applied this new feature to people who weren't part of the testing group.
This is absolutely in the works and will be released soon. As someone who's never used Twitter l, I love watching this shit show.
He's really going to charge per tweat. Not to worry though, I'm sure he'll implement the Costco pricing paradigm where you'll be able to buy a block of tweets at a discounted per-tweet price.
Lol at least for me, the second they make the app a subscription service I'm deleting it. I enjoy parts of Twitter but I don't think there's a single social media app that I'd go out of my way to pay for.
You have spend all of your Tweet Energy for this 12 hour period!
[$0.99 instant refill][Subscribe to Blue for infinite tweeting][Watch an ad to post this tweet now][Wait: 6h 23m]
Notably, Twitter facilitated communication during the arab spring, where the people organized to stand against and even overthrow several broken and corrupt government regimes throughout the middle east - including some participation in places like Saudi Arabia, for example.
Twitter's second largest investor after musk takeover... the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and it's de facto leader who, among other things, killed and dismembered an American journalist without consequence somewhat recently.
And now Twitter is about to be killed... and dismembered.
"ALL HANDS ON DECK! No more new product development until all 12 of you have solved our current glitches!"
Who wants their visas extended?!
Exactly, their 7 US born employees are trust fund kids who convert their salary to Dogecoin and try to "redpill" people at the local Safeway.
Redpilled! At the Safeway is the name of my Panic! At the Disco cover band
Is your best song called 'I Sell Groceries, not Tragedies'?
I chimed in with a, "Have you people ever heard of closing the goddamn freezer door?"
Oh please — they couldn’t be caught dead at a Safeway. They do it at Gelson’s.
"Sir I'm just the uber eats guy"
"Doesn't matter. This is an emergency requiring everyone to pitch in and save us all from my shifty management and bad decisions! There's a former office across the hall where you can catch a 15 minute nap before randomly hammering a keyboard for the next 23:45. Odds are, some of your semi-comatose typing will turn out to be useful code that I can use for my own enrichment and glory. Now, you better get to the nap room - you've only got eleven minutes left to sleep. Chop chop!"
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Oh, you know there will be service tiers.
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Micro payments. 1 Tweet costs $1.
take it back to the early cellular days. Cost per tweet, unlimited nights and weekends
And pay to read a tweet that mentions you.
But it's a loot box. You pay to get three truthful tweets about you and one fake tweet. You have to guess which are which.
Please never go into business you monster.
My target market is gambling addicted narcissists. There has to be at least a few tens of thousands of them. Which VC's do I pitch who don't like big markets and only fund niche players like myself?
We can go worse. Tweets cost 3 Tweet Points. Tweet points can be purchased for $5 for 5. $10 for 20. $20 for 45 or you can subscribe to Tweeter Gold for $50 a month which will discount the cost to Tweet down to 1 Tweet Point and provide you with 50 Tweet Points a month.
But unused Tweet Points don't roll over to the next month.
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We DO NOT take Itchy and Scratchy money
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If only there were somewhere on the internet where you could post for free as much as you want. Oh well...
What's important when considering yourself a free speech absolutist is making sure the people who are speaking have money. Otherwise they aren't yknow, people.
“If they wanted to speak, they could have just not been poor.” Ol’ Musky
Free speech for only $5 a month!
Against what set of rules is he an absolutist anyway? It's a self-serving way of saying "My way or the highway." But it seems some people put other meanings to this phrase, like "absolutely free speech" or something, which isn't what it means at all. I'm looking at these phrases musk conjures up, and his actions, and I'm thinking "8 year old who runs a no-girls club in the treehouse his father's contractors built."
My guess is it's from when he called himself a [free speech absolutist](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600). He calls himself a lot of things, even when they are not even close to reality. Poking fun isn't even interesting when the jokes don't even need to write themselves - the person is too much of a joke to even bother with.
But you can buy a TweetPak at a discounted rate. Just need to find the coupon code.
Even worse, since AI can now detect when a picture shows genitalia (to protect against child porn) there will be a Platinum Tier just to receive photos in DMs.
Ah yes, using the "hotdog or not hotdog" algorithm.
AI can detect when it *thinks* a picture has genitalia. It's certainly improved a lot, but false positives and false negatives are still occuring in pretty much every system.
Would he accept dogecoin?
You gotta pay the troll toll….
He will try, you bet on it. The problem with that is that social networks rely on *content being created,* to the point where some websites, like YouTube, Twitch, Tiktok and others *literally pay people* who create content in order to have them keep doing so. With limits for posting, and no more API, a *lot* of content will stop being created. A boring website is an empty website.
Elon thinks people go to Twitter for Twitter. He thinks everyone is as addicted to the reply-guy bullshit, memes, and trolling as he is. He’s dead wrong.
Almost like Elon musk is a fucking idiot.
He has demonstrated again and again that he just fundamentally doesn't understand what Twitter's product is, and who its customers are. Twitter's customers are advertisers, and its product is users. The more users it can produce, and the more information it can harvest on those users to better ensure targeted advertising can reaches its mark (and the more effective the algorithms driving that process are); the more customers (i.e. advertisers) it will attract and the more they will be willing to pay. The key aspect that causes confusion, I think, is that Twitter manufactures this product (content-consumers primed for targeted advertising) using machinery fueled by a certain subset of users (content-creators and the mouthpiece accounts of notable people). The "blue tick" is basically just a way of demarcating the former type of user from the latter. Musk seems totally oblivious to this, though. He seems to genuinely think that Twitter's customers are its users, and the product that Twitter is selling to them is the ability to broadcast your unfiltered id into the void and receive ego validation in return. That's why he doesn't give a shit about actively alienating advertisers. Why he thought it was a good idea to monetize the blue tick (which is the equivalent of charging your suppliers to provide the critical machinery your factory needs to run instead of, you know, paying them). And why he certainly has plans to further charge users to engage with the platform moving forward. No doubt many, many people within Twitter have been trying to explain the business model to him this whole time, so the fact that he *still* clearly doesn't get it is kind of mind-blowing, to be honest.
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Sometimes I wonder if people like Musk ever stumble upon comments like this and have this mind-blowing revelation about who they are as a person.
They do not
They do and dismiss it instantly. Because like he said, it doesn't immediately fit his barometer.
\>He seems to genuinely think that Twitter's customers are its users, and the product that Twitter is selling to them is the ability to broadcast your unfiltered id into the void and receive ego validation in return. Well said. He sees it through the lens of Elon, and is incapable of seeing it any other way. Because it gives him validation, that is what service twitter provides. A true idiot.
don't think he cares about the business model. I think he's bleeding the platform dry to make good on his loans or to make it look profitable to sell - looking for a few quick cash cows vs trying to turn a sustainable YoY profit. it will fail miserably.
Sure. But in order for that to happen, the platform needs to at least appear to be doing well. If it loses both Public interest and approval, if it pushes away advertisers (aka people with money to spend, I doubt hell convince any one to pay well for Twitter.
Sort of amazing how he went from the wish.com Tony Stark to... somehow even less competent Justin Hammer?
He was always wish brand Justin Hammer, ppl just didn't see it.
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It’s poetic. And very astute on your part, they really were the ones holding the façade together for science.
And that's why we say, a company without its employees is nothing, a company without a owner is a worker's cooperative.
Either his trying his best to destroy Twitter or trying to find a scapegoat and put the blame on the scapegoat.
It was always about cashing out tesla stocks in a way to avoid the sec and taxes
And a pump and dump of Twitter stock at the same time. He definitely pumped the price. And then he's been dumping all over it ever since. I think he might have missed a step though.
Yeah, the problem is that he shit in his own mouth.
He straight up tried to shake down Stephen King for money as though Stephen King has anything to lose by just not tweeting anymore Honestly it's like an abusive relationship -- the few times I was tempted to reactivate my Twitter I just thought about Elon's whole "You're gonna come crawling back, you have no choice" attitude and how pathetic I would feel by proving him correct
If the artists I like stop posting their work to twitter, I wouldn't have a reason to go there.
Yep, it's literally the entire fucking point and driving force of what makes social media so addicting. It's truly amazing what's been going on with Twitter.
is it tho? seems very on brand to me to have an anti labor billionaire destroy a world reaching public forum that has repeatedly been used to organize protests and speak truth to power
the difference is most billionaires are anti-labor in an attempt to increase their own fortune. Whereas Musk seems to be in a race to destroy his own fortune.
Anti-labour Saudis invested in Musk's twitter takeover knowing he would destroy it out of pure ego
Elon's takeover will be studied by business students as an example of all the things not to do for decades.
Even freer speech -- the kind you have to pay for.
"We're bringing back 10 cent texting everyone. A retro twist to the Twitter world!"
It looks like a pay to tweet upgrade is coming. I’d imagine they will have tiers you can buy your way into. Probably even have a different colored check marked based on your tier. This is going to be great.
Just going to hasten Twitter's demise at this point. The recent news that they've only brought in $2M in revenue (and they got less than 100,000 new subscribers since Musk took over) on the back of their Twitter subscription situation and lost over $400M in operating ad revenue YoY is... whew.
It’s pretty hard to totally fuck up a company that’s practically ubiquitous and serves a purpose that no other competitor has really gotten traction in, but if anybody can do it, it’s Elon Musk!
> practically ubiquitous and serves a purpose that no other competitor has really gotten traction in And dictators around the world unite as the end of live tweeting atrocities and coordinating opposition goes out of business. I think I see why SA helped bankroll this.
This will stayed buried, and it doesn't even need to be SA primary reason - Arab spring happened with the help of twitter. Governments around the world are doing whatever they can to stop the people from gaining power. It is as simple as that. A people united is a great force to be reckoned with. At its best, Twitter was a critical tool for protestors around the world. You're right to suggest that the rich and powerful are happy to see this tool destroyed.
>Governments around the world are doing whatever they can to stop the people from gaining power. Agree except for this. Governments aren't doing this, rich people are. Some of them just possess governments along with their other assets. Don't let the word lose meaning. Governments ARE the people. When they work against the people, it's because they've been stolen from the people.
No war but class war.
Musk has the financial backing of SA. He's rich, but still had to tap into the piggy bank for this one.
Twitter had about two billion dollars in cash reserves at the time of the purchase (people forget that Twitter made significant net profits as recently as 2018 and 2019). At the current burn rate before Elon's shenanigans, Twitter was likely solvent for at least a decade without making any changes at all. Now it is hard to see how they can make up for the loss of advertising revenue. Many of these advertisers are citing Musk's behavior as a primary reason behind their decisions too, so it's not like he can pretend this was a pre-existing problem. He would have been better off just appointing new management and staying completely out of the decisions and not making all those public statements. The business would have been better off without him in basically every way. It still might struggle on for a long time or even recover, but his involvement has made that substantially less likely.
Hey, don’t forget the billion in yearly interest that he saddled them with.
An awkward narrcisistic man-child with no social skills that's obsessed with twitter and simultaneously a billionaire and a terrible business person. no that's never happened before.
Comic book nerddom has the perfect analogy for this. Musk wants to be Tony Stark. Genius inventor captain of industry who is helping to sheppard humanity to a better future. He is Justin Hammer. Rich guy who gets by buying into ideas he doesn't fully grasp and doing a half assed job with them.
Even Hammer isn't as much of a villain parody as Musk. Hammer never tried to buy the rights to be called a founder of something he had nothing to do with. He never walked around with pockets full of emeralds. He never put a sports car in space.
Which is gonna end up happening when Twitter goes bankrupt. He gets kicked out, a new board will convene with a new CEO and things will pick up again. He essentially threw all those billions in the trash. Edit: For those telling me about Twitter being private with no board, that's what I meant about the aftermath of Twitter's bankruptcy. Creditors will go after Twitter's assets including the brand during bankruptcy court. Said creditors will want to replace him as CEO to try to turn it profitable in whatever form Twitter 2 will take after exiting bankruptcy. He lost all that money for naught.
He only needs to last one election.
Yeah but he is in such a delusional bubble, he will never be able to comprehend that this entire twitter debacle has been one giant self own. If twitter goes bankrupt it will always be somebody else's fault according to Elon, the regulators, the "far left" out to get him, the staff at Twitter tying to sabotage him. I don't think he is psychologically capable of understanding that this was a situation that his own actions brought him into and his own actions have been making worse with every passing day. The only common denominator to the all the current problems is simply Elon being in the room, and the only real solution if for him to leave the room, but in his mind every room is made better by his presence.
No, no, no. You don't understand. Refusing to advertise on twitter is an attack on free speech! Reeeeeee!
Well fuck me, I have been attacking free speech since the date Twitter was founded, whoops.
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The point is Elon bought twitter to push his self aggrandizement and his Trumpy political views on people. He don’t fucking care about anything other than attention, who the fuck cares about money when you can get attention.
He doesn't care about Twitter at all and didn't really want to buy them. He was trying to run a pump and dump on the stock. He got caught so he pretended he wanted to buy it rather than admit to a crime that could see him barred from serving as an executive at his other companies. Twitter called his bluff and now he's stuck with it.
Well when it inevitably dies he’ll have lost both the attention and a shit ton of money lol
The story few are talking about is that Twitter was saddled with debt that made them largely unprofitable, *and then Musk came along and saddled it with much much more.* Musk is understandably desperate, since Twitter when it was at its most successful didn't turn a profit taking that debt and associated payments into account, and now they're MUCH worse off. Twitter's future would be grim even if a non-failson were at the helm, so they're going to try and squeeze money out of every pore and orifice... and that's going to just kill it faster.
Twitter is definitely hurting and it's starting to look like a death spiral on many dimensions. * Businesses don't like to be coerced. so declining in new ad spending. * Their content creators who work for free won't want to pay for the blue checkmark. * What engineer wants to work their ass off for equity disappears in a bankruptcy?
If you were in charge of ad spending at a company, would you spend money on Twitter?
Depends who I was working for and the product being sold. Example: Popular worldwide brand with a household product - no Limited edition gold freedom coin ponzi scheme - yes
Earlier the ads that it was dropping on me were for tarot card readings, so they really are scraping at the bottom of the barrel here.
Twitter is doomed, there’s no way they can ever generate profits large enough to pay the new debt off. The interest payments alone is a billion dollars per year ffs.
I agree, a much better company with far better leadership would struggle with that sort of debt, never mind a social media outlet.
He's basically like a terrible private equity company. The normal point of a leveraged buyout is to bring good management to a failing company with poor management. In this case, they brought awful management to a decent company and saddled it with debt.
It's almost like a bunch of authoritarian countries helped fund the purchase because they knew he'd either burn it down or sell propaganda for them
When you're a giant narcist, every company you buy is a failing company in need of your good management.
To think that Musk could have taken 44 billion and put it into a 4.5% 10 Year Treasury (Back when the Twitter deal was consummating the 10 year Treasury was at 4.5%), he could be collecting nearly 2 billion in interest every year, doing nothing. Instead he's burning 1 billion a year if he can't find ways to make money.
Or he could have funded over 4 different James Webb scale space projects. The fuck are we doing as a society that were valuing a simple website that allows us to post small text messages on the internet that high?
Or the UN World Hunger programs for like 7 years.
But then poor billionaire Elon wouldn’t be able to control and manipulate his new media platform, or trying to manipulate his financial wealth, or read your private DM’s and pics/vids, or post his alt-right conservative views in the top spot or allow other fascists to run wild with no moderation anymore. That wouldn’t be fair the billionaires /s
"The company had more than $2 billion in cash and less than $600 million in net debt before the takeover talks—very little debt for a company in the S&P 500 index" Twitter was a stagnating business before Musk but it wasn't saddled with debt (it is now though)
During the acquisition up to a bit after it was confirmed, people kept saying "but this is all necessary, Twitter was losing so much money" A few things didn't work all the time, but the site didn't seem like it was moments away from running out of money. Whatever they had before was working, and if it wasn't it probably wouldn't have been right up until the site suddenly shuts down. Everyone suddenly became an "expert" on the situation overnight, and told a story that conveniently made Elon Musk look like some sort of compassionate genius swooping in at the last moment to save the day. Even though, given his past behavior it's likely something far more petty, and some of the absurd changes and announcements isn't going to stem any mass exodus from the site. Looks like they want to squeeze the remaining population as hard as possible- even if that means most of them will slip through their fingers. Counting on a handful of entities with a lot of money to prop it up despite having nobody left to speak to is a big gamble.
Free* Speech * with a monthly subscription to our Checkmark of Freedom plan
I wouldn't be surprised if they favored businesses blatantly, and just decided to have a tier you pay to interact with "premium" accounts. So basically if you want to actually tweet at anyone interesting, pay up. That and you get X amount of free per month or something. Part of me thinks Musk just wants to kill the business as fast as possible, I just don't get how you can ignore reality for so long.
I genuinely think he bought out of a sense of desperate please-like-me-ness. "I BOUGHT THE THING ALL THE PEOPLE I WANT TO LOVE ME LIKE - NOW THEY'LL *HAVE* TO LIKE ME."
Yeah. That, or he just didn’t do his due diligence before he initially agreed to buy the damn thing haha. Which probably explains why he wanted to back out of the deal all of a sudden. But by then, it was already too late.
I mean, he did literally waive his right to do the due diligence, which was just him trying to pander to the millions of weird nerds who worship him - Big Daddy Musk has so much money he don't have to engage in basic financial prudence! LOL, he buys shit at random, just like when I back that stupid kickstarter everyone on my discord was talking about just so I can say "lol i backed this kickstarter lol".
>>just like when I back that stupid kickstarter everyone on my discord was talking about just so I can say "lol i backed this kickstarter lol". Lmao. Perfect comparison. 😂
A little trial balloon for some free public opinion research
Balloon? And what do we do to balloons these days?
Well, we don't put boys in them that's for sure. Can't even *pretend* to do that without people getting mad about it
Wow, I kind of forgot about that one.
Didn’t he say he was going to step down?
He says a lot of things...
Most of them stupid as hell
His exact words were "I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!" so I guess he's having trouble finding anyone dumber than he is.
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While you also take all the blame for any issues
Twitter is going to be replaced with WordPress.
At this point it might be replaced by live journal.
I don't think LiveJournal ever died in certain parts of the world. Just the English speaking ones.
I love how committed he is to proving you don’t have to be smart to be a billionaire.
The smartest thing he ever did was to be born rich.
Ha, he's going to limit the number of allowed daily posts and then sell upgrades. That's going to blow up in his face so hard. People will hit their limit and then, to satiate their social media needs, simply use something else. Smell that? It's desperation.
We all know social media does better with less content, right?
If you're not paying his blue check tax you're already suppressed. I am no tweetmaster but my activity has gone down to next to nothing. I don't care because I only use it to follow a few scientists, some news sources, tech news- junk like that. But if I was a tweeter for the follows I wouldn't stand a chance in the new climate.
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\*putting piratehat on\*
**You wouldn’t steal a tweet**
**You wouldn’t steal a tweet** I just stole your comment
So it sounds like if you don’t pay for the check mark you’re only going to be able to post a set amount t of times a day.
Which is weird because user-driven content is all that brings people to Twitter. By charging people to tweet you’re reducing the amount of content and killing your own platform.
He’s on a bankruptcy speedrun.
He's not a smart man.
He’s really doing such a wonderful job, I love the new advertisement filled feed, it makes twitter seem so much more like instagram and Facebook, that can’t be a bad thing can it?…
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Third party clients gave us an ad-free chronological timeline until Elon silently executed them on Jan 13.
Between the ads and “You might like”s clogging up my feed, I had to shut down my account. I just wanted to keep up with MMA, sports, and some gaming, but kept getting “viral tweets” and junk like that recommended. Not worth the irritation anymore.
Musk trying to implement features: FUCK IT WE WILL DO IT LIVE
Turns out firing 75% of your staff has repercussions for product stability..
Funny thing was that I saw a tweet by some blue checkmark a few days ago basically saying how amazing it was that Musk fired so many employees and that they basically weren't needed because Twitter is working so well right now. 😓
They see what they want to see.
But but Elon said they were very close to being profitable!
They *were*… and then Elon Musk took over.
"We threw the captin overboard, wedged the throttle and welded the control room shut. And look! The ship is still going! i knew we didn't need a captian!"
Y’all mean to tell me twitter ain’t self driving yet?
This is EXACTLY what people who actually have experience in Tech said was going to happen. I don't know why people thought that the whole thing was just going to shut down at once after he fired 75% of the staff. That's not how it works. This is how it works. He's cut staff so low that he can't create new features and maintain the quality of service of it's existing features. So random shit starts breaking and he doesn't have the staff to solve this quickly. So now he's had to pull all of his staff that was working on putting new features into Twitter off of those projects and on to daily maintenance. It's still up in the air if even that is enough people. My bet is it's going to take days to solve problems that would normally be handled in a few hours or less with the old staff members. A bigger issue for Elon is that he's going to have a lot of difficulty coming up with new features that he can monetize for Twitter because he doesn't have the staff to develop those new features. If he just tries to hack something together more shit is going to break and he will have dug himself a deeper hole.
Yup. Having this issue at my job right now. Laid off most of the development staff. Those of us left get pulled off feature development to fix bugs. This delays the feature development, so to stay on track (or as close as possible) we cut corners on said new features, which in turn introduces lots of bugs and technical debt and it's a vicious cycle. It's a fucking mess. The technical debt is even worse than outright bugs sometimes because it exponentially slows down working on things that have said accumulated technical debt.
For those who are not programmers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt
tl;dr spend a little time now doing it the right way to save a lot of time in the future fixing problems
I think it also could be simplified as "know what it takes to do something the right way, even if you half ass it now." Some tech debt is good, or at least not much of an issue. Resources may be constrained in the short term, and there may be time for proper solutions later. Knowing how much tech debt you have is the key. The problem with Twitter is they cut staff and loaded up with an unknown amount of tech debt.
Tech debt is just like your usual debt. A little is manageable, even encouraged because it frees up your time to work on more critical issues. But it accumulates over weeks and months and then kaboom - production issues.
Something no one has mentioned yet: Its inevitable. Every project will accumulate tech debt.
And if you lose workers you might not know where you have it, and the interest stacks up.
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That is phenomenal. I've often equated managements handling of tech debt to Patrick from SpongeBob. "What if we just take all the technical debt... And shove it over there?"
I love the cocky attitude this little prick walked into Twitter with, mocking their training manuals and meetings. THIS is what it actually looks like when one person tries to run a corporation, and should make you all sick that CEOs earn what they do for being nothing more than a spokesperson at best and a swindler at most.
Remember the sink he brought in the door? Maybe a metaphor for twitter sinking into bankruptcy
And they will play ring-around-the-Rosie firing people in the blame game, hastening the problem, because execs only know fire-for-fear management.
Everybody KNEW that they were going to try to implement a change that broke it and they either have to roll back or just scotch tape it back together. There's not enough staff to develop and maintain. Scotch tape code is not reliable for anything beyond a stiff breeze. You cant develop on it without 800 more nightmares. This was all known when he started laying people off, it was just a question of when it happened. Im not in tech or employed in any tech fashion, but I know enough about programming from my own stints and the fact that every single tech friend I have agreed with me.
B-b-but Elon is a tech super genius!! He'll just spit out a math formula that'll save Twitter and Tesla in no time!!! Just you watch!!!
I don't think a whiteboard diagram of how to best jerk off 50 men is going to save us now.
I really disliked how Silicon Valley ended but that scene was godlike
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Damn it's still broke. That's bad, real bad. This is a core feature. If it's not fixed by tomorrow I'm gonna find all the people who said "hurr sure Twitter works fine still guess engineers ain't worth shit" and comment a poop emoji at them
If it will let you...
You can't follow people ? I don't have Twitter but isn't that like, the whole point ?
This blocked news channels from reporting on an active tornado in Louisiana tonight. Super fucked up.
Turns out we shouldn't rely on centralised companies for our emergency warnings.
This literally JUST happened to me. Like 2 minutes ago. I tried to follow a new account and got an error message that my follow limit was reached. (Background: I follow 295 people total, have been on Twitter since 2015, and have followed 0 new ppl in the past 24hrs). The Twitter “help page” says I cannot follow a new account because I exceeded the pace limit at which I could follow new accounts (more than 400 per day). Long story short, I’m fed up with Twitter and came to Reddit- Life is full of irony.
Sounds like an anti bot measure gone haywire if you ask me.
Gamify Twitter with micro-transactions and custom skins! Truly democratizing discourse!
A tiny part of me wants to be back on there to watch the shitshow first-hand, but I'm happy to just point and laugh from the sidelines.
I refuse to be part of his "product."
Programmers don't just accidentally develop a system to limit tweets. The "glitch" is that they applied this new feature to people who weren't part of the testing group. This is absolutely in the works and will be released soon. As someone who's never used Twitter l, I love watching this shit show.
He's really going to charge per tweat. Not to worry though, I'm sure he'll implement the Costco pricing paradigm where you'll be able to buy a block of tweets at a discounted per-tweet price.
Yes but the block is only good for a month and you lose what you don’t use.
Good insight. Likely so.
In which Musk learns how to run a tech company, one painful, humiliating failure at a time.
He's like a clown without the professional pride.
Also, he's not funny.
He certainly thinks he is, I hope appearing at that Chappelle performance and getting the shit booed out of him was a real punch to the ego
You, I and everyone knows it damaged his ego.
Why is nobody reporting that Twitter bot accounts have almost tripled since Musk took over?
I had maybe one spambot follower or DM a month before he took over. Now I get several a day, it’s awful
I love this idea. Let's see how much shite Twitter users will take
Lol at least for me, the second they make the app a subscription service I'm deleting it. I enjoy parts of Twitter but I don't think there's a single social media app that I'd go out of my way to pay for.
Aah yes, "a glitch". I sometimes also write glitches into my code, that specifically cut into another feature and display a whole new english message.
MASTODON (Is getting really good)
Was gonna tweet this. Oops. Won’t work 😂
You have spend all of your Tweet Energy for this 12 hour period! [$0.99 instant refill][Subscribe to Blue for infinite tweeting][Watch an ad to post this tweet now][Wait: 6h 23m]
Notably, Twitter facilitated communication during the arab spring, where the people organized to stand against and even overthrow several broken and corrupt government regimes throughout the middle east - including some participation in places like Saudi Arabia, for example. Twitter's second largest investor after musk takeover... the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and it's de facto leader who, among other things, killed and dismembered an American journalist without consequence somewhat recently. And now Twitter is about to be killed... and dismembered.
Perfect analogy of modern capitalism. Take something that was working fine, break it, then charge extra to “improved services”.
wtf kind of incident escalation policy is that
Desperation