You fucked up real good, kiddo.
Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.
[…]The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that.
Fin.
Although I am not sure Elon is the savior for Twitter as many expect, I think Twitter being bought out was inevitable.
They have been bleeding money for a while: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR/financials?p=TWTR . Last two years were especially bad, but even though they had periods of positive income, it was probably a fluke.
Personally, I have seen Twitter as a modern essential utility. It brings more people together compared to landline, or even maybe GSM phone service. It is also driving a lot of IoT devices, and other niche uses as a messaging platform. Basically it offers a good value for the world. (again, with all the bad content).
Anyway, they never were able to monetize this value. They tried selling thru tweets (old American Express experiments), they tried advertising (not enough), they tried selling premium features.
Compare that to LinkedIn, which is essentially printing money: https://www.statista.com/statistics/976194/annual-revenue-of-linkedin/#:~:text=In%20the%20fiscal%20year%202022,during%20the%202020%20fiscal%20period.
LinkedIn also provides a very valuable service. But it is highly moderated, or rather self moderated, hence users actually like the time and money spent on that platform.
That being said, I was expecting a larger company to purchase twitter, not a single investor. I am not sure Elon would be able to steer the ship around, especially if the early attitude is any indication.
But I would be actually glad if twitter thrives.
I pretty much agree. It’s a utility, a reverse-IRC.
If he wants to add features and business units to it, I think that will pretty much self-moderate it.
I don’t think Elon Musk is in it to make money. He can write off the 44 billion spend and keep funding Twitter’s capex at a loss for decades and it will only make a 25% dent in his net worth. This is equivalent to a mere millionaire buying an expensive yacht to have some fun.
Elon Musk didn’t just drop his own cash on the deal. He has at least 7 billion in investor commitments as of May of this year.
https://www.reuters.com/business/how-is-elon-musk-funding-his-44-bln-offer-buy-twitter-2022-05-05/
Firing half of their staff and redoing their advertising/revenue structure sounds like an easy sell for him as CEO these days.
$44 billion dollarydoos on a lark… all these propped up tech companies and he wanted Twitter?
Elon has NEVER been about the money. It just so happens that what he did with Tesla turned out to be VERY popular and literally caused as big of a change in transportation as when we went from horses to cars.
Because he wanted to make money? NO! He wanted to help save the planet! And guess what? That IS happening!
He didn’t build SpaceX to be a big penis like Bezos did. He did it so that he could get people to Mars so that when humans, one of THE DUMBEST animals ever to exists, when we ultimately DESTROY OURSELVES, we will at least be on two planets and have to destroy ourselves on both of them before we cease to exist as a species. A very stupid species that wants to kill ourselves but a species anyway.
He didn’t start The Boring Company or Neuralink or the first online phone book (NO SHIT, it’s TRUE!) or eBay or … take your pick of any of the companies.
Elon LOVES the IDEA of Twitter and he just hates how it is run, not financially but the choices they make about who can can say what, where, why and how and he wants to change it. If he makes money doing so, well that will just be a byproduct of the company and his only reason for caring is that he doesn’t want Twitter to go broke and go away. He does want it to be different, possibly VERY different, but he doesn’t want it to go away.
Twitter is currently WAY over staffed and bleeding money. Nobody notices because the Twitter executives have been hiding it because they are making so much money that they keep turning a profit despite themselves. It’s like they have the right to print money.
But even the executives at Twitter admitted that they need to lay off a bunch of people. That is the first sign that even they know that Twitter is rotten at the core and that something serious needs to happen. Which is why, when someone who was sleep deprives and had more money than God (not really but thank GOD this isn’t TRUMP buying Twitter) made a stupid agreement to save the product that he loves to communicates with.
That’s all it is. He wants to keep communicating the way he does or maybe in even a better way that Twitter doesn’t do right now. But he felt that the way things were, Twitter was going to crash and burn and go bye bye and he didn’t want that. It’s not about money and power per sey. It’s about not wanting Twitter to die anymore than he wants humans to die off as a species. I just don’t understand how people don’t get that yet.
And Fin, you are probably right. Elon is probably damned no matter what he does with Twitter. The funny thing is, the people that hate him now just might love him because of Twitter. And the people that love him now might just hate him because of Twitter. We’ll just see what happens. I just hope that he isn’t so busy with Twitter that Tesla or some other company suffers too much from inattention. That’s MY bigger worry.
Elon wants to save the planet. Hmmm, let it sink in…
Yes. Let it.
Pretty sure he is in the Exodus faction and wants to abuse the earth and leave it.
I am not sure we can say so conclusively that “Elon has NEVER been about the money”. The first company he founded with his own money was a financial services company after all. I would agree that Musk seems less focussed on luxury and lifestyle than power and possibility when it comes to money. I have said similar things to “he wanted to save the planet” myself but this may not be true either.
What I think we CAN say is that Elon Musk cares about Mars.
Long before he had real money, Musk was involved with the Mars Society. Musk was ousted from PayPal but was still its largest shareholder when Peter Thiel took PayPal through an IPO in February 2002 and then sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion in October. Musk founded SpaceX in May 2002. Mars is where Musk put his time before he had money and where he put his money when he became rich. Mars is his passion project.
Musk did not start Tesla. He was an investor in 2004 and took over as CEO in 2008 when the company went through a leadership crisis. He had already been CEO of SpaceX for 6 years at that point. As you say, Tesla has certainly made him rich and it still represents something like two-thirds of his wealth.
Musk did not start Solar City. He backed his cousins as an investor in 2006 and bought the company in 2016 ( via Tesla ).
He founded OpenAI in 2015, NeuralLink in 2016, and The Boring Company in 2017. OpenAI was the fourth company he founded after Zip2 in 1995 ( mapping ), X.com in 1999 ( money ), and SpaceX in 2002 ( Mars ).
Woow.. just, wow.
The amount of worship Musk gets is insane.
You honestly think he isn’t in things for money? Well, I guess you are some what right. Like most narcissists, he’s in it for power and ego fuel.
You really can watch how he acts, talks.. literally everything he does and still think he’s some sort of egalitarian savior?
He didn’t start eBay, btw. I think you mean PayPal. And he didn’t even start that. He /co-founded/ x.com merged with Conformity and rebranded with Conformit’s product… PayPal. Entirely different things. He also didn’t start Tesla.
Dear God the brainrot is bad.
But I guess “he make lots money! He do things I like! He cool!” It’s enough for people.
Early on (early 2010’s) I was definitely in the “oh look, a real life tony stark” camp. After a few years though seeing all the right to repair problems Tesla was tossing on customers, the ego-driven Tesla charging connector, and the excess of his personality… I bailed on that line of thought. Elon is in it for Elon. He doesn’t want to save the world, he wants to troll anyone in it who has slighted him and watch the world burn.
Yeah, electric cars owe a lot to Tesla for showing legacy auto how to make them sexy, fast, etc. However you can appreciate a product without worshiping the creator. Is Tesla #1 today? Yeah, they’re definitely ahead, however companies like Rivian are starting to bark at their heels.
Elon, you’re not Steve Jobs. You’re someone who invested in the right thing at the right time… He’s going to burn himself out. I think the Cyber Truck is the perfect example of his ego coming off the rails.
!remindme in 10 years
I think a lot of people, in many walks of life get absorbed in Fanatical worship of people and tie their own personal worth in the exploits of that person. You see it in sports, religion, business, politics, etc. I used to think sports fans were nuts, but now I realize its actually much better for society that they put their love in something as relatively harmless as sports. Better than politics or business. You can see with crypto/meme stocks how damaging it can be to themselves and society at large.
Surely Elon just wants to use Twitter as a neural network to improve his AI projects? I don’t know how this would work but surely there’s enough data in Twitter to create a seriously evil AI robot!
Twitter morphs into a Starlink exclusive app.
You joke, but he wants to transfer all existing services into something like WeChat called X.
https://fortune.com/2022/10/05/what-is-x-app-elon-musk-twitter-takeover-accelerant-for-wechat-rival/