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And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package. Now we'

And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package. Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now. I think this is also a great experiment for everyone who either thinks Elon is a genius and the greatest thing to bless this Earth, or those who say he's overrated and Tesla and SpaceX were successes independent of him. I think Twitter has been around long enough that we've all formed impressions of it. Let's see what this single change of replacing ownership actually results in. Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?

mshenfield 4y ago
Twitter won't die, but it won't make much of a profit either. Elon Musk will find another buyer in 2 years for $25 billion and make most of his money back while leaving the company saddled with most of the $11 billion in debt financing.
Waterluvian 4y ago
I'm curious how they decided who to fire and how they can do it so quickly without accidentally axing critical people.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago
  Critical is mostly subjective to whom you ask. In one way everyone is critical, in another no-one is critical (Except E.g. Ive or Jobs). That said, I would think they are axing critical people. Then struggle and either fix it or go under. Whenever I was involved in layoffs, critical people have been laid off (from my perspective). As a manager I was forced to lay off critical people before M&A. Because they we're critical positions I did rehire the positions after acquisition.
mabbo 4y ago
> Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? Myspace still exists in some form.
- smrtinsert 4y ago
  Sure, no social network has maintained prominence ever.
- bottlepalm 4y ago
  200 billion in value at least. Not kidding. You’re going to see a Twitter that’s has not innovated at all in 10 years start making changes at crazy speed. All social platform competitors will be attacked.
irae 4y ago
To me the key factor is not if Elons other companies would have succeeded without him. The key factor is that he started all other companies or joined just after the start. Twitter on the other hand has a lot of history and past leaderships. On the other hand, I think Twitter has so much momentum, it will take a lot of time to implode if Musk makes (even a lot of) mistakes.
bioemerl 4y ago
This isn't a too great demonstration of "you only need" because there will be a lot of brain drain issues with this company, worry and drama internally resulting in bad productivity.
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
  He sought out the drama so if he's capable he should've predicted it and been fine with it because he has ways to resolve it, something like that.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    Oh absolutely, but at that point you're judging more the qualities of Elon's ability to lead a company then the consequences of having too many or too few people to run a big website like Twitter.
Loughla 4y ago
>Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? I'll bite on this one. For reference, I personally believe Elon Musk is a degenerate blowhard who has literally zero concept of what life actually is like for billions of people on the planet, nor does he care. I believe he belongs to the class of people known as 'parasites'. Here's my take: 1 year: Initially, we'll see improvements. Dead weight is cut, along with some live branches, but we see improvements. More free and open speech, I believe he will follow through on that. Fringe groups have a louder voice and can find people to join their causes, leading to further polarization of politics across the globe, and especially in the US. 3 Years: Quality and use is declining as celebrities and politicians have begun to move away from Twitter due to constant abuse from toxic individuals, up to and including "vague" threats of violence. A minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them. 5 Years: Twitter is dead. There was a political assassination that was formed, planned, and tweeted/broadcast from Twitter live. This may be a state level politician or federal, but it will be someone many people know the name of. Elon Musk blames the engineers for not properly implementing his AI software intended to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Edit: If you disagree, could you tell me why?
- flanked-evergl 4y ago
  > up to and including "vague" threats of violence. I'm no expert in Twitter, but I have heard many people of note complain about receiving death threats on Twitter. One example: https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-death-threats-video-twitter https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dea... > Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed that some mornings she starts her day by reading the death threats she has received from men on Twitter. Making a death threat, or a threat of violence, is not protected speech, it is a crime. Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform? Also, if it was already happening (up to and including "minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them"), is this the trajectory you see regardless of ownership? And if not how will new ownership contribute to it?
  - notatoad 4y ago
mikkergp 4y ago
It will be interesting to see how Elon defines success. Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users. So if you think Elon is going to succeed at making Twitter a better Twitter as we know it, then I'm confident this take is wrong. Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he is good at min-maxing, but I don't know that Twitter has a great competitive advantage to build on. It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter. The biggest thing Elon would have to do is build trust with users and partner companies and that certainly does not seem like the direction he's heading. On the one hand I wouldn't bet against Elon, on the other hand the deck seems stacked against him. He'll have to prove he can run a SASS Twitter with minimal staff, which may be possible. But I don't know he does that and goes into al these other areas (payments, advertising, trust and safety) that seem very hands on to build relationships with partner companies, PCI Compliance, handle customer concerns, fraud etc. Managing people requires people. He wants to make the moderation process more transparent? He'll either have to invent perfect text analysis AI, or he'll need people to process and respond to abuse complaints and petitions. This TC article sums up the X challenges pretty well: https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/08/elon-musk-x-everything-wechat-tesla-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/08/elon-musk-x-everything-wec...
- matthewaveryusa 4y ago
  He won't need PCI compliance. He's going to attempt to make a wechat with cryptocurrency as a method of payment in collaboration with binance. We'll see if it sticks.
  - mdaEyebot 4y ago
    It'll probably stick for however long it takes for Musk to publish a history of someone's paid-video purchases in response to a mean tweet. Not sure what problem a cryptocurrency would solve in this case.
deleted 4y ago
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maxbond 4y ago
Erring on the side of things often changing less then we may anticipate, my guess is that Twitter becomes a sort of Tumblr for people of a certain persuasion, that being the people who like the ideas Musk is putting forward. It still exists, it puts out new features from time to time, there's a large group of people who simultaneously love and hate it and spend enormous time and energy there, but it's role as the primary town hall forum is passed on to some other community or set of communities. Maybe ones we know today, maybe ones we don't. But my confidence that I can forecast this is low, I'm mostly taking a stab for a bit of fun and to look at this comment in a few years. One thing I have a high degree of confidence is that Musk will declare victory in almost any outcome, and if it's really so egregious that he can't declare victory with a straight face, he'll find some way to blame everyone else in the world.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > Airing on the side of things Pretty sure you mean "erring", here.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    Darn homophones! Thanks
    - commandlinefan 4y ago
      Oh, I get it, I've been a victim of homophonia myself in the past.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  In an ideal world, we'd see municipalities, schools, and community services like fire/police move to an open platform like Mastodon. In reality... they'll probably move to TikTok because "that's what the kids use these days".
giancarlostoro 4y ago
I dont understand the SpaceX argument since he was an actual original founder if I'm not mistaken, I could see the Tesla argument, but those people never provide any true insight into how he is riding on Teslas former success whenever I run into those (not to mention, if it was so good... why did they need a new CEO). I think it's pretty obvious he is a capable individual, overly ambitious at times, but hey, he somehow makes it work. I try to be neutral about him, but as a Software Engineer, he is easy to admire, he is able to work on various tech related companies at once and make it work. That is no small feat. We have discussed on HN before that companies like Amazon having employees peeing in bottles usually those sort of issues come down from the top (CEO tier) and trickle down to the bottom, if that's true, and Elon is awful, it would show in all his companies, but he manages to delegate correctly enough to keep a few large companies going.
- maxbond 4y ago
  Keeping factories open during the initial COVID lockdowns because of your personal belief that it's "just the flu", and thus putting the lives of your employees at risk, seems like a direct analog to peeing in bottles to me.
  - beanjuiceII 4y ago
    - maxbond 4y ago
      I'm not going to accept that assertion without evidence, but even if we grant it, it's not an okay thing to do to put hundreds of your employees, and their families, at risk because you have a fucking hunch. Even if Musk were a superhuman thinker with really great hunches it wouldn't be an acceptable thing to do.
      - origin_path 4y ago
        Do you really think he made such a call based on a hunch and not on the actual IFR data ?
gwbas1c 4y ago
> Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? 1: Profitable 2: More signal, less noise 3: Significantly less misinformation 4: (Maybe) A reliable way to get news Personally, I'm eating popcorn on this one. I think Musk got himself in trouble for letting his big mouth yap, and he fired the execs as revenge. As a software developer who's seen good and bad organizations, I'm very curious about the layoffs.
- VectorLock 4y ago
  >Significantly less misinformation Considering day 1 the new head of Twitter posted false information about the Pelosi attack from a site known to publish fake news, I'm going to guess this probably won't be the case.
  - h3rsko 4y ago
    And on day two the Biden white house was "fact checked" so brutally on a tweet that they ended up deleting it. That would never have happened under the previous regime. A republican white house - sure, but not to Biden.
    - boc 4y ago
      Biden’s statement wasn’t wrong. The fact check just provided a statement stating that the reason social security payments were the highest they’ve ever been is because they are automatically tied to CPI. It’s weird to editorialize fact checks. If Biden said the payments were the highest ever, but the payments were actually lower, then sure add a fact check and provide the real number. It’s honestly an example of how much of a mess Elon is stepping in with this venture.
      - rhino369 4y ago
        >Biden’s statement wasn’t wrong. Bullshit. ". . . through President Biden’s leadership" is objectively false. It's through the CPI adjustment he had nothing to do with. Even if you leave that out it is intentionally misleading. It's the sort of lie the media (rightfully) wouldn't let Trump get away with.
Alex3917 4y ago
> I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks I'm not trying to minimize the fact that this sucks for those affected, but let's not also forget that prior to the acquisition, the employees were given multiple opportunities to unionize and/or turn Twitter into an employee-owned company. This is the direction they collectively chose to go in instead.
- ink_13 4y ago
  Were they, though? Or would Twitter have employed the standard Big Tech response, which is to immediately terminate anyone who does the barest amount of serious organizing?
saiya-jin 4y ago
A prediction - trump will get back on Twitter and will again use the hell out of it, with corresponding election results
- pelorat 4y ago
  I don't think so. That would mean admitting his Truth Social platform is not as good as Twitter. I don't think he'd do that.
edderly 4y ago
I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.
- duhast 4y ago
  Why do you think so?
  - reitanqild 4y ago
    Look at early WhatsApp until they were aquired. Vastly more innovative and scaled crazy fast without fail whales or anything. Or look to Telegram today. Delivering a vastly more complex product with a fraction of the company size it seems.
    - jameshart 4y ago
      Aren’t WhatsApp and telegram messaging services rather than microblogging services? The difference between a messaging app and a microblogging app is basically the difference between an O(n) problem and an O(n^2) problem. If you don’t think that adds some complexity, you’re kidding yourself.
      - scarmig 4y ago
        They're different problems, but messaging isn't some trivial thing. And a user having a single unified public view of their tweets is pretty much O(n).
      - reitanqild 4y ago
        I might be underestimating how hard it is to scale microblogging. I most certainly am. But have you looked at the scale of what Telegram provides both in width and at scale? Certainly there are celebrities with more followers on Twitter than the largest Telegram channels, but Telegram scales surprisingly far, and I haven't seen it struggle more than once or twice since the start.
      - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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seydor 4y ago
This is an opportunity to go back to RSS with perhaps some extensions. Nothing would feel more satisfying than downloading your tweets to host them wherever by yourself.
hn2017 4y ago
The reason he's laying off people. Due to his financing, he has to pay $1 billion per year just in interest. "Love to borrow money to buy a company and then saddle that company with the debt so I can lay off thousands of people" https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1587457450311122945 https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1587457450311122945
- suzzer99 4y ago
  It should be illegal to buy a company with money you borrow against the value of that company. When your primary financial goal is servicing debt over building long term value - the incentives become completely misaligned.
  - DesiLurker 4y ago
    agree to an extant, but we do it all the time with mortgages, as in buy with loan against value of the asset. the only difference is that bank wouldn't give me a 2M loan against 1M house. In this case this seems like a play on credibility of Musk that banks & other investors are willing to overpay. IMO its a mistake & misaligns the incentives but lets see. I do however feel that there should be civility in these layoffs regardless of what Musk's belief's about performance of these employees (or Musk fanboi's). There should be proper severance/healthcare and prorated vesting.
    - suzzer99 4y ago
      But it doesn't hurt the pubic good if my house gets repossessed. When companies are run into the ground, it results in massive layoffs and less consumer choice. Or in this case the loss of an important and unique disseminator of information. Similar stuff is happening with most of the local papers in the country. Although in that case the whole business model is dying. But vulture capitalists are hastening the demise by squeezing every the lifeblood out of the business and destroying what's left of the public goodwill.
      - DesiLurker 4y ago
agumonkey 4y ago
I also wonder about the social effect. Twitter rapidly settled its position as some kind of global heartbeat.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
I think where elon will take twitter is a sort of idea -> project -> mass colaberation, society sized incubator, were news and policy discussions are just a byproduct. But may im just projecting. But it would make kind of sense, to have it all in one app, from pitch, to finance, to realization
- ZanyProgrammer 4y ago
  > is a sort of idea -> project -> mass colaberation, society sized incubator, were news and policy discussions are just a byproduct. This is VC speak that is gibberish and means nothing.
chasd00 4y ago
> Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? what I hope is that it shrinks to about 1/20th its current size. And then many many smaller platforms spring up. I think one thing that makes social media hard to manage is the sheer scale. It's likely much easier to manage/moderate a smaller social network than a huge one. Also, it wouldn't be as dramatic to be kicked off a platform because then you'd just go somewhere else. if not that, then i hope Musk moves it from the users being the product to the users being the customer. Charge $10 for 1,000 tweets but keep it free to read. Or maybe charge money for rate of tweets like $10 gets you 5 tweets a day. Make it cost money to engage. Twitter would probably shrink (which is good IMO) but also make more money ( which is good ) and make mobrule, massive information warfare etc cost actual money.
- LanceH 4y ago
  > And then many many smaller platforms spring up and they are successful by interoperating, until one becomes more popular than the others and turns proprietary. (I just want to get my prediction in also)
- guelo 4y ago
  > 1/20th its current size. And then many many smaller platforms spring up That's not how social networks work because the bigger they are the more useful they are to users.
  - chasd00 4y ago
    No, the bigger they are the more useful they are to advertisers. The best social network i've ever been a part of is one dedicated to a hobby i'm in with about 1k users max.
- mrtranscendence 4y ago
  Having to pay to tweet would be the death of Twitter. It wouldn't just shrink, it would be thoroughly decimated. It would initiate a vicious spiral in which Twitter becomes less attractive to read because fewer people are using it to tweet, which causes fewer people to feel the need to tweet, etc. As the audience shrinks big names leave the platform (because getting attention was the name of the game for them), causing even more of the rank-and-file to leave. Advertiser revenue would plummet. Any Twitter that does possibly survive would be a zombie, so minimally profitable there'd be no conceivable way of keeping up with those interest payments. I get the point information warfare, but you may as well just wish for Twitter and other social media platforms to outright die.
bentt 4y ago
In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires that work for him and then will wander back over to SpaceX as they get closer to Starship getting off the ground. People will be flipping out the whole time and a few Twitter competitors will rise, which will be great. Each Twitter alike will take on its own culture and the bubbles will now be network wide, much like they are with big press outlets like Fox and NYT. But Twitter will be the big daddy that all the journalists are on and if you want to broadcast something it will be the best place.
- kaashif 4y ago
  Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk manages to make a positive return on his investment. However good you are, if you pay way too much for something, you're worse than someone who just didn't overpay and made no other changes.
  - bentt 4y ago
    Well, how do you measure return? People seem to think one of three things about Elon Musk: A) Musk is a typical rich asshole who only loves money. B) Musk is a typical power hungry asshole who loves power and money is a side effect. C) Musk is a big nerd who thinks he can solve big problems better than other people, and power and money are side effects. I believe he's type C (Hopeful Nerd). So for that type of person, his positive return is solving the problem. He thinks he can fix social media. He thinks social media is a big problem. He thinks humans need to fix social media or they are fucked, just like if they don't get off oil they are fucked, and just like if they can't leave Earth they are fucked. Fundamentally, he does think humans are worth saving. I would bet that the vast majority of people that choose to work with Elon believe he is type C (Hopeful Nerd) and believe in humanity as well. That's why they put up with all of his flaws and toxicity - because they believe in the cause and know it's a broken eggs == omelet situation.
marcus_holmes 4y ago
I'm curious about whether a paid-for social media business can survive. We so thoroughly educated everyone that social media is free, and there seems to be such resistance to the idea of paying for it, that I doubt it. But I tend to agree with ol' Musky that this has to move from the ad-supported model to improve. I'm also curious at the rumblings from US politicians. What would happen if the USA nationalised Twitter? Given that politicians from all over the world use it too. A case for a UN intervention? So many people I know are leaving Twitter, but the political class seems to need it, so I don't see it dying any time soon.
chillfox 4y ago
My guess is they will be forced to retreat from a lot of international markets as they don’t have the legal and moderation staff to keep up with regulation.
flashgordon 4y ago
So looking at other siblings comments in this subthread, sounds like Elon is a genius, rigor in future Twitter, high calibre talent blah blah blah. Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!
- flashgordon 4y ago
  Damn sorry folks. Not sure how this got posted twice. Is there anyway I can delete this one (i understand deletions are not on).
flashgordon 4y ago
So looking at other siblings comments in this subthread, sounds like Elon is a genius, rigor in future Twitter, high calibre talent blah blah blah. Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!
kenjackson 4y ago
> I hope there's a decent severance package If Musk's behavior with exec termination is any indication, there will be no severance package.
- thebradbain 4y ago
  And then there will be a huge class action in violation of California’s WARN Act. He’s going to have to be paying out at least 2 months pay as severance.
  - kenjackson 4y ago
    The class action in violation of WARN has already started.
eftychis 4y ago
It's not like he took over a hard job. Twitter had a loss but had been profitable before. Twitter has a huge following/user-base worldwide. The hard part of creating the brand has happened. He just needs not to break it, trim some fat and appease advertisers. (In a possible recession, so that is the hard part of his job.) The HARD problem Elon has is of his own creation. He leveraged massively to bring this deal to fruition. During a downturn. So if let us say Tesla stock goes down considerably that might be an issue. If Twitter does not get called for its debt, Elon is going to make lots of money when he "brings it back to the people," out of pure kindness mind you, and it goes public again or there is a secondary offering. He bought it in bad times at "low brand value." The other value to Elon is he will increase his brand. Elon's value is in his name. Twitter can help him there, as it does daily. Edit: P.S. Oh, a bit more related: It will get sued. In fact it already is in the process from my understanding for botching/ignoring California WARN act regarding layoffs. So... good way of spending money. And he can not demand them to waive it off with a severance letter.
throw2022110401 4y ago
One thing is for sure: It will be absolute hell for those who will have to keep things running in the coming months. For better or worse Twitter infra is extremely comlex. 50% gone would be very rough even if the cuts were made thoughtfully and things were in KTLO-only mode. But that's not the case. Musk has already been pushing changes through skipping the normal process and will likely continue doing so, aggressively. Not a good combination.
jiveturkey 4y ago
> I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. that’s akin to saying, I hardly drive so I don’t care about the price of gas. Doesn’t bother me. twitter has influence and reach far beyond what the mDAU implies.
nostrademons 4y ago
"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." -- Warren Buffett
- xeromal 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing this.
rednerrus 4y ago
My guess is that very few Ops people are going to be part of this layoff.
pookha 4y ago
Twitter is a toxic clown party lama joust. It's nothing but a means for millions of narcissistic people to decorate themselves with signifier quotes and feel-good platitudes. twitter is where progressives go to sniff each others farts... So good for Elon for charging them 8 dollars a month for their little blue checks. What an embarrassment to my generation twitter is and it makes me ashamed that people in my industry created such a heinous (platform).
psadri 4y ago
There is at least one extreme data point that says you can do an incredible amount with very few people: WhatsApp (~30 engineers @ 500M daily users) At that point WhatsApp had first class clients for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia and Web + a server backend that scaled to 2B+ daily users. This doesn't happen by accident. WhatsApp founders created an environment where this could happen: - focusing on a few things (saying no a lot) - everyone on the team is highly capable - a work environment that allows people to focus on work (minimal meetings, good long term planning, fixing root causes vs constant firefighting...)
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> And so the grand experiment begins. If Elon "pulls it off" and shows other tech company leadership boards "you can get by with 1k employees instead of 7k" (or whatever the final number ends up being), what does that mean for the future of tech jobs?
Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
> The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now. So, here's what I've never figured out... Once your app is built, and you've figured out how to scale it, and everything is autoscaling nicely, and you've reached the critical mass Twitter has...why do you still need all the engineers? Why do you need to keep growing? At some point, isn't the scaling solved? Once you have a platform that can handle 400M MAUs, what more is there to build? Does it really take 1,000 engineers to maintain? I'd think automation could take care of most grunt work involved with maintenance.
- btgeekboy 4y ago
  Once your app gets to that level, even keeping the lights on requires work. Third party dependencies don’t stop updates, security or otherwise. Laws and regulations change. Advertisers demand features that aren’t seen by the general public. Multiple SRE teams are needed to handle oncall rotations, outages, etc. And now that you have thousands of employees, you need to start building automated HR and IT tooling.
- dstola 4y ago
  I think the issue with these massive scale apps is that people want better and fresher features which are not always well defined and get lost in the maze of product development of a huge company. They have to make decisions, do we go with web3 stuff or do we improve current NLP system etc etc. Making decisions is much easier for a small startup than a behemoth of twitters size. And yes, it takes many people. 1000 engineers? Maybe not, bloat has set in at that point, but a few hundred for sure.
dclowd9901 4y ago
Doesn’t Craigslist have like 12 employees?
fleddr 4y ago
I'd say it's typical discourse in today's world to consider Musk either a total failure or the greatest genius ever. Everything has to be boiled down to this simple Disney-like binary. Anyway, on this one I consider the chance of failure to be high, from a financial point of view but also because a social network is not an engineering challenge. That said, he seems to seek out such unlikely adventures. I think Twitter will first take a massive hit before it rises to new heights, if it does.
- swyx 4y ago
  > a social network is not an engineering challenge this is a sign that youve never had to support the scale of a popular social network
  - fleddr 4y ago
    That was not what I was trying to say. I meant that it's not JUST tech, it involves a huge amount of politics, legislation, privacy, government relations, etc.
mikestaub 4y ago
Twitter will integrate with blueskyweb.org and the lightning protocol which will bridge users into web5. This will create a Cambrian explosion of innovation in the consumer social space, and begin the end of web2 social platforms like Facebook and Tiktok. The twitter social graph will be used to bootstrap a true Wechat competitor that is based on open protocols and data. Either that or it goes up in flames within 6 months.

mshenfield 4y ago

Twitter won't die, but it won't make much of a profit either. Elon Musk will find another buyer in 2 years for $25 billion and make most of his money back while leaving the company saddled with most of the $11 billion in debt financing.

Waterluvian 4y ago

I'm curious how they decided who to fire and how they can do it so quickly without accidentally axing critical people.

KingOfCoders 4y ago
Critical is mostly subjective to whom you ask. In one way everyone is critical, in another no-one is critical (Except E.g. Ive or Jobs). That said, I would think they are axing critical people. Then struggle and either fix it or go under. Whenever I was involved in layoffs, critical people have been laid off (from my perspective). As a manager I was forced to lay off critical people before M&A. Because they we're critical positions I did rehire the positions after acquisition.

mabbo 4y ago

> Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? Myspace still exists in some form.

smrtinsert 4y ago
Sure, no social network has maintained prominence ever.
bottlepalm 4y ago
200 billion in value at least. Not kidding. You’re going to see a Twitter that’s has not innovated at all in 10 years start making changes at crazy speed. All social platform competitors will be attacked.

irae 4y ago

To me the key factor is not if Elons other companies would have succeeded without him. The key factor is that he started all other companies or joined just after the start. Twitter on the other hand has a lot of history and past leaderships. On the other hand, I think Twitter has so much momentum, it will take a lot of time to implode if Musk makes (even a lot of) mistakes.

bioemerl 4y ago

This isn't a too great demonstration of "you only need" because there will be a lot of brain drain issues with this company, worry and drama internally resulting in bad productivity.

KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
He sought out the drama so if he's capable he should've predicted it and been fine with it because he has ways to resolve it, something like that.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  Oh absolutely, but at that point you're judging more the qualities of Elon's ability to lead a company then the consequences of having too many or too few people to run a big website like Twitter.

Loughla 4y ago

>Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? I'll bite on this one. For reference, I personally believe Elon Musk is a degenerate blowhard who has literally zero concept of what life actually is like for billions of people on the planet, nor does he care. I believe he belongs to the class of people known as 'parasites'. Here's my take: 1 year: Initially, we'll see improvements. Dead weight is cut, along with some live branches, but we see improvements. More free and open speech, I believe he will follow through on that. Fringe groups have a louder voice and can find people to join their causes, leading to further polarization of politics across the globe, and especially in the US. 3 Years: Quality and use is declining as celebrities and politicians have begun to move away from Twitter due to constant abuse from toxic individuals, up to and including "vague" threats of violence. A minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them. 5 Years: Twitter is dead. There was a political assassination that was formed, planned, and tweeted/broadcast from Twitter live. This may be a state level politician or federal, but it will be someone many people know the name of. Elon Musk blames the engineers for not properly implementing his AI software intended to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Edit: If you disagree, could you tell me why?

flanked-evergl 4y ago
> up to and including "vague" threats of violence. I'm no expert in Twitter, but I have heard many people of note complain about receiving death threats on Twitter. One example: https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-death-threats-video-twitter https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dea... > Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed that some mornings she starts her day by reading the death threats she has received from men on Twitter. Making a death threat, or a threat of violence, is not protected speech, it is a crime. Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform? Also, if it was already happening (up to and including "minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them"), is this the trajectory you see regardless of ownership? And if not how will new ownership contribute to it?
- notatoad 4y ago

mikkergp 4y ago

It will be interesting to see how Elon defines success. Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users. So if you think Elon is going to succeed at making Twitter a better Twitter as we know it, then I'm confident this take is wrong. Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he is good at min-maxing, but I don't know that Twitter has a great competitive advantage to build on. It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter. The biggest thing Elon would have to do is build trust with users and partner companies and that certainly does not seem like the direction he's heading. On the one hand I wouldn't bet against Elon, on the other hand the deck seems stacked against him. He'll have to prove he can run a SASS Twitter with minimal staff, which may be possible. But I don't know he does that and goes into al these other areas (payments, advertising, trust and safety) that seem very hands on to build relationships with partner companies, PCI Compliance, handle customer concerns, fraud etc. Managing people requires people. He wants to make the moderation process more transparent? He'll either have to invent perfect text analysis AI, or he'll need people to process and respond to abuse complaints and petitions. This TC article sums up the X challenges pretty well: https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/08/elon-musk-x-everything-wechat-tesla-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/08/elon-musk-x-everything-wec...

matthewaveryusa 4y ago
He won't need PCI compliance. He's going to attempt to make a wechat with cryptocurrency as a method of payment in collaboration with binance. We'll see if it sticks.
- mdaEyebot 4y ago
  It'll probably stick for however long it takes for Musk to publish a history of someone's paid-video purchases in response to a mean tweet. Not sure what problem a cryptocurrency would solve in this case.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

maxbond 4y ago

Erring on the side of things often changing less then we may anticipate, my guess is that Twitter becomes a sort of Tumblr for people of a certain persuasion, that being the people who like the ideas Musk is putting forward. It still exists, it puts out new features from time to time, there's a large group of people who simultaneously love and hate it and spend enormous time and energy there, but it's role as the primary town hall forum is passed on to some other community or set of communities. Maybe ones we know today, maybe ones we don't. But my confidence that I can forecast this is low, I'm mostly taking a stab for a bit of fun and to look at this comment in a few years. One thing I have a high degree of confidence is that Musk will declare victory in almost any outcome, and if it's really so egregious that he can't declare victory with a straight face, he'll find some way to blame everyone else in the world.

commandlinefan 4y ago
> Airing on the side of things Pretty sure you mean "erring", here.
- maxbond 4y ago
  Darn homophones! Thanks
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    Oh, I get it, I've been a victim of homophonia myself in the past.
dont__panic 4y ago
In an ideal world, we'd see municipalities, schools, and community services like fire/police move to an open platform like Mastodon. In reality... they'll probably move to TikTok because "that's what the kids use these days".

giancarlostoro 4y ago

I dont understand the SpaceX argument since he was an actual original founder if I'm not mistaken, I could see the Tesla argument, but those people never provide any true insight into how he is riding on Teslas former success whenever I run into those (not to mention, if it was so good... why did they need a new CEO). I think it's pretty obvious he is a capable individual, overly ambitious at times, but hey, he somehow makes it work. I try to be neutral about him, but as a Software Engineer, he is easy to admire, he is able to work on various tech related companies at once and make it work. That is no small feat. We have discussed on HN before that companies like Amazon having employees peeing in bottles usually those sort of issues come down from the top (CEO tier) and trickle down to the bottom, if that's true, and Elon is awful, it would show in all his companies, but he manages to delegate correctly enough to keep a few large companies going.

maxbond 4y ago
Keeping factories open during the initial COVID lockdowns because of your personal belief that it's "just the flu", and thus putting the lives of your employees at risk, seems like a direct analog to peeing in bottles to me.
- beanjuiceII 4y ago
  - maxbond 4y ago
    I'm not going to accept that assertion without evidence, but even if we grant it, it's not an okay thing to do to put hundreds of your employees, and their families, at risk because you have a fucking hunch. Even if Musk were a superhuman thinker with really great hunches it wouldn't be an acceptable thing to do.
    - origin_path 4y ago
      Do you really think he made such a call based on a hunch and not on the actual IFR data ?

gwbas1c 4y ago

> Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? 1: Profitable 2: More signal, less noise 3: Significantly less misinformation 4: (Maybe) A reliable way to get news Personally, I'm eating popcorn on this one. I think Musk got himself in trouble for letting his big mouth yap, and he fired the execs as revenge. As a software developer who's seen good and bad organizations, I'm very curious about the layoffs.

VectorLock 4y ago
>Significantly less misinformation Considering day 1 the new head of Twitter posted false information about the Pelosi attack from a site known to publish fake news, I'm going to guess this probably won't be the case.
- h3rsko 4y ago
  And on day two the Biden white house was "fact checked" so brutally on a tweet that they ended up deleting it. That would never have happened under the previous regime. A republican white house - sure, but not to Biden.
  - boc 4y ago
    Biden’s statement wasn’t wrong. The fact check just provided a statement stating that the reason social security payments were the highest they’ve ever been is because they are automatically tied to CPI. It’s weird to editorialize fact checks. If Biden said the payments were the highest ever, but the payments were actually lower, then sure add a fact check and provide the real number. It’s honestly an example of how much of a mess Elon is stepping in with this venture.
    - rhino369 4y ago
      >Biden’s statement wasn’t wrong. Bullshit. ". . . through President Biden’s leadership" is objectively false. It's through the CPI adjustment he had nothing to do with. Even if you leave that out it is intentionally misleading. It's the sort of lie the media (rightfully) wouldn't let Trump get away with.

Alex3917 4y ago

> I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks I'm not trying to minimize the fact that this sucks for those affected, but let's not also forget that prior to the acquisition, the employees were given multiple opportunities to unionize and/or turn Twitter into an employee-owned company. This is the direction they collectively chose to go in instead.

ink_13 4y ago
Were they, though? Or would Twitter have employed the standard Big Tech response, which is to immediately terminate anyone who does the barest amount of serious organizing?

saiya-jin 4y ago

A prediction - trump will get back on Twitter and will again use the hell out of it, with corresponding election results

pelorat 4y ago
I don't think so. That would mean admitting his Truth Social platform is not as good as Twitter. I don't think he'd do that.

edderly 4y ago

I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.

duhast 4y ago
Why do you think so?
- reitanqild 4y ago
  Look at early WhatsApp until they were aquired. Vastly more innovative and scaled crazy fast without fail whales or anything. Or look to Telegram today. Delivering a vastly more complex product with a fraction of the company size it seems.
  - jameshart 4y ago
    Aren’t WhatsApp and telegram messaging services rather than microblogging services? The difference between a messaging app and a microblogging app is basically the difference between an O(n) problem and an O(n^2) problem. If you don’t think that adds some complexity, you’re kidding yourself.
    - scarmig 4y ago
      They're different problems, but messaging isn't some trivial thing. And a user having a single unified public view of their tweets is pretty much O(n).
    - reitanqild 4y ago
      I might be underestimating how hard it is to scale microblogging. I most certainly am. But have you looked at the scale of what Telegram provides both in width and at scale? Certainly there are celebrities with more followers on Twitter than the largest Telegram channels, but Telegram scales surprisingly far, and I haven't seen it struggle more than once or twice since the start.
    - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

seydor 4y ago

This is an opportunity to go back to RSS with perhaps some extensions. Nothing would feel more satisfying than downloading your tweets to host them wherever by yourself.

hn2017 4y ago

The reason he's laying off people. Due to his financing, he has to pay $1 billion per year just in interest. "Love to borrow money to buy a company and then saddle that company with the debt so I can lay off thousands of people" https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1587457450311122945 https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1587457450311122945

suzzer99 4y ago
It should be illegal to buy a company with money you borrow against the value of that company. When your primary financial goal is servicing debt over building long term value - the incentives become completely misaligned.
- DesiLurker 4y ago
  agree to an extant, but we do it all the time with mortgages, as in buy with loan against value of the asset. the only difference is that bank wouldn't give me a 2M loan against 1M house. In this case this seems like a play on credibility of Musk that banks & other investors are willing to overpay. IMO its a mistake & misaligns the incentives but lets see. I do however feel that there should be civility in these layoffs regardless of what Musk's belief's about performance of these employees (or Musk fanboi's). There should be proper severance/healthcare and prorated vesting.
  - suzzer99 4y ago
    But it doesn't hurt the pubic good if my house gets repossessed. When companies are run into the ground, it results in massive layoffs and less consumer choice. Or in this case the loss of an important and unique disseminator of information. Similar stuff is happening with most of the local papers in the country. Although in that case the whole business model is dying. But vulture capitalists are hastening the demise by squeezing every the lifeblood out of the business and destroying what's left of the public goodwill.
    - DesiLurker 4y ago

agumonkey 4y ago

I also wonder about the social effect. Twitter rapidly settled its position as some kind of global heartbeat.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

I think where elon will take twitter is a sort of idea -> project -> mass colaberation, society sized incubator, were news and policy discussions are just a byproduct. But may im just projecting. But it would make kind of sense, to have it all in one app, from pitch, to finance, to realization

ZanyProgrammer 4y ago
> is a sort of idea -> project -> mass colaberation, society sized incubator, were news and policy discussions are just a byproduct. This is VC speak that is gibberish and means nothing.

chasd00 4y ago

> Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? what I hope is that it shrinks to about 1/20th its current size. And then many many smaller platforms spring up. I think one thing that makes social media hard to manage is the sheer scale. It's likely much easier to manage/moderate a smaller social network than a huge one. Also, it wouldn't be as dramatic to be kicked off a platform because then you'd just go somewhere else. if not that, then i hope Musk moves it from the users being the product to the users being the customer. Charge $10 for 1,000 tweets but keep it free to read. Or maybe charge money for rate of tweets like $10 gets you 5 tweets a day. Make it cost money to engage. Twitter would probably shrink (which is good IMO) but also make more money ( which is good ) and make mobrule, massive information warfare etc cost actual money.

LanceH 4y ago
> And then many many smaller platforms spring up and they are successful by interoperating, until one becomes more popular than the others and turns proprietary. (I just want to get my prediction in also)
guelo 4y ago
> 1/20th its current size. And then many many smaller platforms spring up That's not how social networks work because the bigger they are the more useful they are to users.
- chasd00 4y ago
  No, the bigger they are the more useful they are to advertisers. The best social network i've ever been a part of is one dedicated to a hobby i'm in with about 1k users max.
mrtranscendence 4y ago
Having to pay to tweet would be the death of Twitter. It wouldn't just shrink, it would be thoroughly decimated. It would initiate a vicious spiral in which Twitter becomes less attractive to read because fewer people are using it to tweet, which causes fewer people to feel the need to tweet, etc. As the audience shrinks big names leave the platform (because getting attention was the name of the game for them), causing even more of the rank-and-file to leave. Advertiser revenue would plummet. Any Twitter that does possibly survive would be a zombie, so minimally profitable there'd be no conceivable way of keeping up with those interest payments. I get the point information warfare, but you may as well just wish for Twitter and other social media platforms to outright die.

bentt 4y ago

In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires that work for him and then will wander back over to SpaceX as they get closer to Starship getting off the ground. People will be flipping out the whole time and a few Twitter competitors will rise, which will be great. Each Twitter alike will take on its own culture and the bubbles will now be network wide, much like they are with big press outlets like Fox and NYT. But Twitter will be the big daddy that all the journalists are on and if you want to broadcast something it will be the best place.

kaashif 4y ago
Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk manages to make a positive return on his investment. However good you are, if you pay way too much for something, you're worse than someone who just didn't overpay and made no other changes.
- bentt 4y ago
  Well, how do you measure return? People seem to think one of three things about Elon Musk: A) Musk is a typical rich asshole who only loves money. B) Musk is a typical power hungry asshole who loves power and money is a side effect. C) Musk is a big nerd who thinks he can solve big problems better than other people, and power and money are side effects. I believe he's type C (Hopeful Nerd). So for that type of person, his positive return is solving the problem. He thinks he can fix social media. He thinks social media is a big problem. He thinks humans need to fix social media or they are fucked, just like if they don't get off oil they are fucked, and just like if they can't leave Earth they are fucked. Fundamentally, he does think humans are worth saving. I would bet that the vast majority of people that choose to work with Elon believe he is type C (Hopeful Nerd) and believe in humanity as well. That's why they put up with all of his flaws and toxicity - because they believe in the cause and know it's a broken eggs == omelet situation.

marcus_holmes 4y ago

I'm curious about whether a paid-for social media business can survive. We so thoroughly educated everyone that social media is free, and there seems to be such resistance to the idea of paying for it, that I doubt it. But I tend to agree with ol' Musky that this has to move from the ad-supported model to improve. I'm also curious at the rumblings from US politicians. What would happen if the USA nationalised Twitter? Given that politicians from all over the world use it too. A case for a UN intervention? So many people I know are leaving Twitter, but the political class seems to need it, so I don't see it dying any time soon.

chillfox 4y ago

My guess is they will be forced to retreat from a lot of international markets as they don’t have the legal and moderation staff to keep up with regulation.

flashgordon 4y ago

So looking at other siblings comments in this subthread, sounds like Elon is a genius, rigor in future Twitter, high calibre talent blah blah blah. Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!

flashgordon 4y ago
Damn sorry folks. Not sure how this got posted twice. Is there anyway I can delete this one (i understand deletions are not on).

flashgordon 4y ago

kenjackson 4y ago

> I hope there's a decent severance package If Musk's behavior with exec termination is any indication, there will be no severance package.

thebradbain 4y ago
And then there will be a huge class action in violation of California’s WARN Act. He’s going to have to be paying out at least 2 months pay as severance.
- kenjackson 4y ago
  The class action in violation of WARN has already started.

eftychis 4y ago

It's not like he took over a hard job. Twitter had a loss but had been profitable before. Twitter has a huge following/user-base worldwide. The hard part of creating the brand has happened. He just needs not to break it, trim some fat and appease advertisers. (In a possible recession, so that is the hard part of his job.) The HARD problem Elon has is of his own creation. He leveraged massively to bring this deal to fruition. During a downturn. So if let us say Tesla stock goes down considerably that might be an issue. If Twitter does not get called for its debt, Elon is going to make lots of money when he "brings it back to the people," out of pure kindness mind you, and it goes public again or there is a secondary offering. He bought it in bad times at "low brand value." The other value to Elon is he will increase his brand. Elon's value is in his name. Twitter can help him there, as it does daily. Edit: P.S. Oh, a bit more related: It will get sued. In fact it already is in the process from my understanding for botching/ignoring California WARN act regarding layoffs. So... good way of spending money. And he can not demand them to waive it off with a severance letter.

throw2022110401 4y ago

One thing is for sure: It will be absolute hell for those who will have to keep things running in the coming months. For better or worse Twitter infra is extremely comlex. 50% gone would be very rough even if the cuts were made thoughtfully and things were in KTLO-only mode. But that's not the case. Musk has already been pushing changes through skipping the normal process and will likely continue doing so, aggressively. Not a good combination.

jiveturkey 4y ago

> I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. that’s akin to saying, I hardly drive so I don’t care about the price of gas. Doesn’t bother me. twitter has influence and reach far beyond what the mDAU implies.

nostrademons 4y ago

"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." -- Warren Buffett

xeromal 4y ago
Thanks for sharing this.

rednerrus 4y ago

My guess is that very few Ops people are going to be part of this layoff.

pookha 4y ago

Twitter is a toxic clown party lama joust. It's nothing but a means for millions of narcissistic people to decorate themselves with signifier quotes and feel-good platitudes. twitter is where progressives go to sniff each others farts... So good for Elon for charging them 8 dollars a month for their little blue checks. What an embarrassment to my generation twitter is and it makes me ashamed that people in my industry created such a heinous (platform).

psadri 4y ago

There is at least one extreme data point that says you can do an incredible amount with very few people: WhatsApp (~30 engineers @ 500M daily users) At that point WhatsApp had first class clients for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia and Web + a server backend that scaled to 2B+ daily users. This doesn't happen by accident. WhatsApp founders created an environment where this could happen: - focusing on a few things (saying no a lot) - everyone on the team is highly capable - a work environment that allows people to focus on work (minimal meetings, good long term planning, fixing root causes vs constant firefighting...)

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> And so the grand experiment begins. If Elon "pulls it off" and shows other tech company leadership boards "you can get by with 1k employees instead of 7k" (or whatever the final number ends up being), what does that mean for the future of tech jobs?

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago

> The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now. So, here's what I've never figured out... Once your app is built, and you've figured out how to scale it, and everything is autoscaling nicely, and you've reached the critical mass Twitter has...why do you still need all the engineers? Why do you need to keep growing? At some point, isn't the scaling solved? Once you have a platform that can handle 400M MAUs, what more is there to build? Does it really take 1,000 engineers to maintain? I'd think automation could take care of most grunt work involved with maintenance.

btgeekboy 4y ago
Once your app gets to that level, even keeping the lights on requires work. Third party dependencies don’t stop updates, security or otherwise. Laws and regulations change. Advertisers demand features that aren’t seen by the general public. Multiple SRE teams are needed to handle oncall rotations, outages, etc. And now that you have thousands of employees, you need to start building automated HR and IT tooling.
dstola 4y ago
I think the issue with these massive scale apps is that people want better and fresher features which are not always well defined and get lost in the maze of product development of a huge company. They have to make decisions, do we go with web3 stuff or do we improve current NLP system etc etc. Making decisions is much easier for a small startup than a behemoth of twitters size. And yes, it takes many people. 1000 engineers? Maybe not, bloat has set in at that point, but a few hundred for sure.

dclowd9901 4y ago

Doesn’t Craigslist have like 12 employees?

fleddr 4y ago

I'd say it's typical discourse in today's world to consider Musk either a total failure or the greatest genius ever. Everything has to be boiled down to this simple Disney-like binary. Anyway, on this one I consider the chance of failure to be high, from a financial point of view but also because a social network is not an engineering challenge. That said, he seems to seek out such unlikely adventures. I think Twitter will first take a massive hit before it rises to new heights, if it does.

swyx 4y ago
> a social network is not an engineering challenge this is a sign that youve never had to support the scale of a popular social network
- fleddr 4y ago
  That was not what I was trying to say. I meant that it's not JUST tech, it involves a huge amount of politics, legislation, privacy, government relations, etc.

mikestaub 4y ago

Twitter will integrate with blueskyweb.org and the lightning protocol which will bridge users into web5. This will create a Cambrian explosion of innovation in the consumer social space, and begin the end of web2 social platforms like Facebook and Tiktok. The twitter social graph will be used to bootstrap a true Wechat competitor that is based on open protocols and data. Either that or it goes up in flames within 6 months.