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Why does Elon induce such strangely bad faith takes in people? Of course he understands what Twitter's business model was. He's trying to change it. It's perfec

by darawk 4y ago

Why does Elon induce such strangely bad faith takes in people? Of course he understands what Twitter's business model was. He's trying to change it. It's perfectly reasonable to criticize his choice! The direction he's taking it in might not work out. But the idea that he "doesn't know who the customer is" is absurd. There's a bunch more strange takes in this piece, but this first one is pretty emblematic of the class. Elon very well might fail, but there are perfectly reasonable explanations for the things that he's doing, and the way that he's doing them. He's hashing this all out in public in real time because he wants to move extremely fast, and he clearly feels that most of tech, and Twitter in particular, have become fat and lazy. His remedy is to avoid the drawn out process of a "normal ceo": > Instead of doing what any sane new CEO of a troubled entity would do (namely, determining what changes need to be made by spending a bunch of time listening to customers, users, and employees — and then carefully plotting and executing those changes) And instead iterating rapidly, in public. This approach has obvious drawbacks, but it does have benefits in terms of iteration speed, feedback, and avoiding certain kinds of institutional bias. It might not work out, of course, but why are we pretending that it makes no sense? The guy is clearly competent. He does some things I don't always agree with, and I think in particular he's taken a bit of a strange turn in the past few years. However, he's built more successful wildly successful companies - in very difficult industries - than nearly anyone on earth. The idea that he doesn't understand Twitter's business model is just fundamentally a non-serious thing to say.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fatbird 4y ago
You don't turn a plane in flight by slamming the yoke as far left as you can. If you know how to fly, then you know how to make a fast turn, but that means knowing how flying works, how the plane responds, and how your current state will change in response to your inputs. Twitter's business is advertising sales. Musk destroyed a billion dollars in committed pre-sales for 2023, then drove away more advertisers in his attempt to fix the situation, then threatened prospective advertisers with "thermonuclear name-and-shame." He's basically destroyed Twitter's ad sales model without a replacement revenue stream ready to go. $8 for various perqs won't replace a fraction of it even with significant uptake, and this is in the context of adding a billion dollars of annual debt servicing in a company whose revenue was only marginal profitable with the ad sales. On top of that, cutting half the staff with zero notice and ordering a billion dollar reduction in infrastructure costs is a massive amount of organizational chaos added at the same time as he's expecting to iterate quickly and replace a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. None of this is a sane way to remake twitter into an agile, non-ad-dependent company. This is controlled-flight-into-terrain. These are desperate, flailing measures. edit: fixing emphasis
- bombcar 4y ago
  > You don't turn a plane in flight by slamming the yoke as far left as you can. Sometimes you do, depending on what type of plane it is and what you need to do. We'll have a clear picture in a year or two; I'm still holding out for the fail whale's return.
  - fatbird 4y ago
    If you're thinking of the video I'm thinking of, where the blond woman with a ponytail is in an incredibly nimble stunt plane and it looks like she's doing exactly that, slamming the stick one way or the other [0], I think that illustrates my point even better: when she does it, acrobatics result because she's an amazing pilot of that plane; if I was sitting and did it, I'd be splattered on the ground as quickly as it took to fall from the sky. Doing the things that skilled people do doesn't get the same results if you're not also skilled in the same way. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hNkg9mf18Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hNkg9mf18Y
- darawk 4y ago
  > You don't turn a plane in flight by slamming the yoke as far left as you can. If you know how to fly, then you know how to make a fast turn, but that means knowing how flying works, how the plane responds, and how your current state will change in response to your inputs. I'm sure that's true for planes, but I see no reason to believe it's true for Twitter. He's fired a lot of people, but as far as I can tell most of the teams that were killed weren't mission critical. > Twitter's business is advertising sales. Musk destroyed a billion dollars in committed pre-sales for 2023, then drove away more advertisers in his attempt to fix the situation, then threatened prospective advertisers with "thermonuclear name-and-shame." He's basically destroyed Twitter's ad sales model without a replacement revenue stream ready to go. $8 for various perqs won't replace a fraction of it even with significant uptake, and this is in the context of adding a billion dollars of annual debt servicing in a company whose revenue was only marginal profitable with the ad sales. This is true, and an ordinary business owner (particularly of a public company) wouldn't do this because they're afraid of losing money for a quarter. Elon isn't as afraid of that, for obvious reasons. He clearly didn't anticipate the advertisers would do this this quickly, especially before he even made any changes. I'm not sure most people anticipated that. However, the speed with which he's moving has its advantages as well. He just fired 50% of the staff, which presumably nearly cuts their costs in half, since most of a company like Twitter's costs are salaries. So, he does have some breathing room to lose some revenue. > On top of that, cutting half the staff with zero notice and ordering a billion dollar reduction in infrastructure costs is a massive amount of organizational chaos added at the same time as he's expecting to iterate quickly and replace a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. This is true, but thus far that chaos has been completely manageable. Twitter hasn't gone down or had technical problems that I'm aware of. It's still very early, of course, and it might have some soon. But I don't see any evidence that anything he's actually done has caused problems yet. The teams that got cut entirely all seem to me to be non-mission-critical, in a revenue/uptime sense. The mission critical teams got minor haircuts. It doesn't seem at all to me like he's putting the site at risk of going down in a technical sense.

by darawk 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fatbird 4y ago

You don't turn a plane in flight by slamming the yoke as far left as you can. If you know how to fly, then you know how to make a fast turn, but that means knowing how flying works, how the plane responds, and how your current state will change in response to your inputs. Twitter's business is advertising sales. Musk destroyed a billion dollars in committed pre-sales for 2023, then drove away more advertisers in his attempt to fix the situation, then threatened prospective advertisers with "thermonuclear name-and-shame." He's basically destroyed Twitter's ad sales model without a replacement revenue stream ready to go. $8 for various perqs won't replace a fraction of it even with significant uptake, and this is in the context of adding a billion dollars of annual debt servicing in a company whose revenue was only marginal profitable with the ad sales. On top of that, cutting half the staff with zero notice and ordering a billion dollar reduction in infrastructure costs is a massive amount of organizational chaos added at the same time as he's expecting to iterate quickly and replace a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. None of this is a sane way to remake twitter into an agile, non-ad-dependent company. This is controlled-flight-into-terrain. These are desperate, flailing measures. edit: fixing emphasis

bombcar 4y ago
> You don't turn a plane in flight by slamming the yoke as far left as you can. Sometimes you do, depending on what type of plane it is and what you need to do. We'll have a clear picture in a year or two; I'm still holding out for the fail whale's return.
- fatbird 4y ago
  If you're thinking of the video I'm thinking of, where the blond woman with a ponytail is in an incredibly nimble stunt plane and it looks like she's doing exactly that, slamming the stick one way or the other [0], I think that illustrates my point even better: when she does it, acrobatics result because she's an amazing pilot of that plane; if I was sitting and did it, I'd be splattered on the ground as quickly as it took to fall from the sky. Doing the things that skilled people do doesn't get the same results if you're not also skilled in the same way. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hNkg9mf18Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hNkg9mf18Y
darawk 4y ago
> You don't turn a plane in flight by slamming the yoke as far left as you can. If you know how to fly, then you know how to make a fast turn, but that means knowing how flying works, how the plane responds, and how your current state will change in response to your inputs. I'm sure that's true for planes, but I see no reason to believe it's true for Twitter. He's fired a lot of people, but as far as I can tell most of the teams that were killed weren't mission critical. > Twitter's business is advertising sales. Musk destroyed a billion dollars in committed pre-sales for 2023, then drove away more advertisers in his attempt to fix the situation, then threatened prospective advertisers with "thermonuclear name-and-shame." He's basically destroyed Twitter's ad sales model without a replacement revenue stream ready to go. $8 for various perqs won't replace a fraction of it even with significant uptake, and this is in the context of adding a billion dollars of annual debt servicing in a company whose revenue was only marginal profitable with the ad sales. This is true, and an ordinary business owner (particularly of a public company) wouldn't do this because they're afraid of losing money for a quarter. Elon isn't as afraid of that, for obvious reasons. He clearly didn't anticipate the advertisers would do this this quickly, especially before he even made any changes. I'm not sure most people anticipated that. However, the speed with which he's moving has its advantages as well. He just fired 50% of the staff, which presumably nearly cuts their costs in half, since most of a company like Twitter's costs are salaries. So, he does have some breathing room to lose some revenue. > On top of that, cutting half the staff with zero notice and ordering a billion dollar reduction in infrastructure costs is a massive amount of organizational chaos added at the same time as he's expecting to iterate quickly and replace a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. This is true, but thus far that chaos has been completely manageable. Twitter hasn't gone down or had technical problems that I'm aware of. It's still very early, of course, and it might have some soon. But I don't see any evidence that anything he's actually done has caused problems yet. The teams that got cut entirely all seem to me to be non-mission-critical, in a revenue/uptime sense. The mission critical teams got minor haircuts. It doesn't seem at all to me like he's putting the site at risk of going down in a technical sense.