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>Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. I don't see what it is about the Twitter

>Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars. It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.

snoot 4y ago
pschuegr 4y ago
I guess, if you buy the premise that cash flow is problem number one and the company needs a significant pivot, then going into crunch-mode and trying to turn the ship as quickly as possible (at the cost of technical and, uh, sleep debt) is a reasonable solution. Maybe not the best, but reasonable. But it's pretty transparent that the cash flow problem is pretty much a problem because the new owner doesn't really want to own Twitter, or believe it can pay for itself; he wants to own a different product which has as many users as Twitter did. No judgement here, I don't necessarily think he's wrong. But why as an employee would I feel obligated to make his choices my problem?
- mcphage 4y ago
  > I guess, if you buy the premise that cash flow is problem number one Well, luckily you don't need to buy the premise that cash flow was problem number one—after he bought it, he saddled it with so much debt that it definitely became problem number one!
  - pschuegr 4y ago
    Aha, so overpaying _was_ just part of a grand scheme to light a fire under the employees and the fanboys are right that he's playing 6d chess?
    - mcphage 4y ago
      6d? Those are rookie numbers!
      - pschuegr 4y ago
        Fine, 44b then.
DoesntMatter22 4y ago
You know the butterfly effect where one small decision affects tens of thousands of other things? That must have been the day that things were going to well at Tesla, record profits, etc, that Musk got bored and decided he only likes to work under unbearable pressure. So, he made a couple of insulting tweets and now here we are. I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size. Immediately starts by threatening advertisers, retweets that story about Pelosi's husband, fires people (probably needed to be done) and then this crazy scheme. The problem as someone else mentioned is that for Tesla and SpaceX those were really the only two places where you could work if you wanted to do electric cars or space stuff. So they attracted very dedicated people. Twitter is just web dev stuff and these people can work anywhere. It's not a great time to look for a job but when you get a lot of middle aged people who don't necessarily want to upend their life for their job especially when it was extremely cushy before, well, it's bound to be a problem. I do think he'll probably pull this off but it's gonna be a pretty miserable road.
- justapassenger 4y ago
  Problem is that Elon’s ego is much much much bigger than how smart he is . And the gap has been growing for last few years really fast. He really believes he’s smartest guy on earth, god’s gift to humanity and he has moral obligation to achieve whatever he wants to.
  - kmonsen 4y ago
    This is true, and it also mostly says something about his ego not about how smart he is. No humans were ever smart enough to match that ego. That being said I think he is being overly underestimated right now. Clearly he can bring something positive based on history.
    - snoopy_telex 4y ago
      I think he's made a major mis-step with twitter though. SpaceX/Tesla employees work as hard as they do because they believe in the mission of the company. They're willing to just buckle down and do amazing things beyond most people. Twitter had a lot of normal employees, however, it also already had the true believers in the mission. Those people don't seem to have bought Musk's vision and they're leaving the company. He wanted to get just down to those folks, but I think by and large, they're gone. I don't know that he can recover from that mis-step. He needed to come in, explain his vision and got the true believers onboard before he cleaned house IMHO.
phire 4y ago
> I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Twitter board. They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. The offer to buy the company outright might have been more spite than anything else. I think he calmed down and realised what a bad idea his offer was (especially at that price), and then spent the next month or so trying to back out. The second time? Well, he was kind of trapped and was actually forced to buy it. The twitter board were suing him to hold him to the binding deal to buy at $44 billion that he signed. He only finalised the deal to avoid the lawsuit. It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. That's certainly looking like it was the right call.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    I don’t think so. I think although Elon is poorly managing Twitter. What we are seeing is how poorly managed Twitter was behind closed doors. Years of technical debt and no movement or improvements. Sounds like people were just getting over paid and producing very little. Atleast that’s what it seems like from all the ex employees ranting on Twitter about being fired.
    - gonzo41 4y ago
      Maybe... But not all tech debt is bad. As long as it's not holding you back and you are making deliberate choices. Twitter may have been badly managed, but it was consistent in experience. And in a large way that is a valuable product/feature itself. Elon will change things enough that it won't be like what it was, a giant distributed broadcast platform. I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. He seems to be very badly advised at the moment. It's going to lead to a elon against the world situation where he wrecks something everyone likes and he's tarnished forever. He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.
generationP 4y ago
Looks like EM is riven between "make Twitter an open platform for all opinions" and "burn Twitter down". Both good aims, but a mixed strategy does not lead anywhere good.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  This is a completely absurd plan from one person. Especially as egoistic as Musk. He never wanted it to be a free speech platform. Just more pleasing to his opinions
  - brookst 4y ago
    Well yeah. Who in their right mind would want free speech for those they disagree with? /s
- 1attice 4y ago
  ..."both are good aims"? rubs face
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
furyofantares 4y ago
> What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it. I believe the thesis is he thinks it's possible to duplicate WeChat as a ubiquitous everything-app (news, media, social media, payments, ordering in restaurants, shopping, messaging) in the West. Why someone would believe that, I don't know. I imagine thinking you could also be the owner of it might motivate believing it can happen somewhat. I suppose the other thesis is that Twitter was horribly mismanaged and can work on far fewer resources to do more if he runs it like Space X or Tesla. That seems plausible to me though in this case it's beyond me why he thinks the actions he's taken will get him there.
- kmonsen 4y ago
  If he can replicate WeChat this could be a good deal even if current Twitter flashes out in the process. I’m not sure how Twitter is helping in creating WeChat for the rest of the world.
  - majani 4y ago
    WeChat solved a problem specific to the Chinese market, given how it's internet market is structured. In the rest of the world, that problem is solved at an OS or browser level. And buying either of those would have been way cheaper than $44 billion
    - kmonsen 4y ago
      I agree with the first two sentences, but not sure how you think buying a browser or OS would be cheaper. Facebook tried hard and could not do it with a way bigger war chest. Google spent significant money into Android and Chrome (I have worked for both so not impartial). The thing is with both OS and browser is that they are really long term efforts and I am not sure if Elon could pull that of anymore. For sure Elon from 10 years ago could, but not sure if he has the patience anymore. Same with Zuck, I don't think he has the patience for what he is trying to achieve.
- kibwen 4y ago
datavirtue 4y ago
Those damn pens. They are making some healthy people lose their shit when used a bit too heavily. I'm worried about those with PTSD and other trauma being "prescribed" this stuff, honestly. THC vape pen use needs to be studied in-depth. Dangerous. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7757764/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7757764/
- dmonitor 4y ago
  I don't see the relevance
throw2022110401 4y ago
Not to mention the fucking insulting assumption that people were not already working hard. During my tour (left years ago) there have been many time periods when I worked my ass off. I ended up leaving because of the total burn-out and the effect it started to have on my health. Despite that even years later I played with the idea of going back someday. No chance of that now of course. So sad to see it end this way.
- camjohnson26 4y ago
  Do you have an opinion on all the people who are saying that Twitter had too many engineers but never delivered anything?
  - melondusk 4y ago
    I suppose they are asserting that some folks who delivered a product valued at over 40 billion dollars didn't actually deliver anything. That would actually make sense somewhere on social media.
ehnto 4y ago
It makes sense if you just fired 50% of your workforce. Although I could never quite figure out what so many people were doing on the product I imagine, in that 50% of staff were some pretty important roles, that now need their hours covered. I do not considered this fair, ethical or very smart. Just imagine all the tribal knowledge that just vanished. Twitter ought to hope they kept enough of the right infrastructure people around to actually keep the site up.
rodgerd 4y ago
> It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. Yet another one of his relationships burned down and this time his ex is with a trans lady. One of his kids went to court to kick him out of her life while doing the paperwork for her name change. He's been a shitty husband and a shitty father, but instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a decent psychologist he's decided that "woke twitter" are to blame because they kicked a transphobic comedian off the site, and he's spiraled out of control since then. He'd literally rather burn $44 billion dollars than admit that he has shortcomings. Or face a background check on his alleged university credentials.
mandeepj 4y ago
> I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. He lives off Twitter. His fame and fortune would not be where it’s without Twitter and he very well knows it. You can label that an emotional connection or even personal. I don’t think he out right planned to buy it. One thing after another, he found himself locked into - buying it.
- nocoiner 4y ago
  Well, yes. After he presented an acquisition agreement to the Twitter board of directors and presented them with a committed financing package, the Twitter board literally could not refuse Musk’s without spending the rest of their lives in depositions with Twitter public shareholders. So Twitter of course accepted the deal, Musk (voluntarily) signed the merger agreement, and that was that - he was indeed locked into buying the company (subject to certain conditions - receipt of regulatory approvals, Twitter shareholders approving the merger, stuff like that). This was not like hitting a lucky streak at the craps table and waking up 12 hours later with a new wife. The decision to purchase was deliberate. Doesn’t mean he didn’t develop buyer’s remorse after - he most certainly did - but the threatened tender offer, the rich, target-friendly merger agreement - this is exactly how you aggressively and deliberately pursue ownership of a big public company.
  - pschuegr 4y ago
    Basically, his business skills got ahead of his capacity to self-regulate. Flawlessly executed the wrong plan.
    - nocoiner 4y ago
      Well said! He flawlessly executed on a bear hug acquisition strategy. Unfortunately… he turned out not to be the bear.
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      I think I could have bought twitter for $44B too.
andyjda 4y ago
>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor. Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website. Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas. Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue
- torginus 4y ago
  > By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website. And Uber is a tech company because its a taxi service with an app. And Airbnb is tech company because its a house renting company with an app. etc.
- phowat 4y ago
  By that definition no tech company is a tech company. People search things on google because they want to find information , not because of the algorithms that bring that information. People use stable diffusion because they want to create images , whatever the cool ai technology behind it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bboygravity 4y ago
> What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it. Have you ever used Twitter? To someone who has used Twitter in the past weeks this reads like deliberate trolling. Twitter was absolutely terrible to use and the pace of noticible change within days/weeks under Elon is mind blowing to me. He's clearly going fast with things like getting rid of (shadow-)banning for no apparent reason, getting rid of banning anything of a certain political flavor, making Twitter faster (both in browser as well as on Android), getting rid of fake scammer accounts who deliberately impersonated famous people and companies to scam people, getting rid of bots and spam which where a HUGE problem (still are until the transition to verified is done) and so on. I mean getting rid of politically flavored sensorship alone will have a massive impact globally for something like Twitter. That alone was obviously very terrible to many people before Musk. PS: since you said you don't understand what his vision is. My best guess: it's to create a platform that competes with click-bait sponsored propaganda journalism. In the form of citizen journalism on Twitter. I think it could work and I also think there's a huge need for it as traditional journalism is dead in my opinion.
- astrange 4y ago
  > He's clearly going fast with things like getting rid of (shadow-)banning for no apparent reason (He thinks this is happening because he reads his replies and a lot of cranks convinced they're shadow banned are @ing him.) > getting rid of fake scammer accounts who deliberately impersonated famous people and companies to scam people (He made it worse and the big advertisers canceled their campaigns after their stock falling due to fake announcements.)
Taniwha 4y ago
The way I see it Elon boasted 'hardcore!' .... and most of Twitter's employees called his bluff, now he's screwed. All this is really because he doesn't really understand his business - what he's selling is access to Twitter's user's attention .... and he's alienated them all because he thinks it's all about technology
DonHopkins 4y ago
>It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. The entire and obvious and openly stated point of Musk buying Twitter was to reinstate Trump, and re-inflict his regular unhinged sociopathic tweets and lies and misinformation and calls to violence and bullying and hate speech and racism upon everyone in the world again, just when we were all getting used to enjoying not hearing from him every single fucking day and the middle of the night. There's no other rational explanation, and although that obvious explanation may sound completely irrational, so is Musk, and it is still the real reason, and the inextricable consequence, just as predicted by Occam's Razor, and foretold by Musk's own words. There's nothing bewildering about it at all, so stop acting so surprised, and pretending he changed his mind after what he said so emphatically and unambiguously. It's not like it's a secret, or contested. He openly announced it. When people show you who they are and what they'll do, believe them. https://www.voanews.com/a/elon-musk-says-he-d-reinstate-trump-s-twitter-account-/6565834.html https://www.voanews.com/a/elon-musk-says-he-d-reinstate-trum... >Elon Musk Says He'd Reinstate Trump's Twitter Account >"I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump," Musk said. "I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice." >Musk added that Trump's ban was "morally wrong and flat-out stupid." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/28/twitter-donald-trump-return-elon-musk-takeover-civil-rights https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/28/twitter-d... >Twitter braces for Donald Trump’s return as Elon Musk takes over platform >Hate speech and misinformation experts are bracing for the return of Donald Trump to the platform, as Elon Musk completes his acquisition of Twitter.
benj111 4y ago
They've lost 50%+ of their staff. They'll have to go 'hardcore' just to stand still.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  They've probably already lost 95% of the 'hardcore' people. If you're good, and EM's threatening to fire everyone, then you get another job. The people who've stayed are presumably makeweights and time-servers.
randomsearch 4y ago
His stated thesis is to turn it an “everything app”. Hardcore engineering may be needed to pivot and get to profitability. https://www.reuters.com/technology/what-is-an-everything-app-why-does-elon-musk-want-make-one-2022-10-05/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/what-is-an-everything-app...
siggen 4y ago
This was more to reduce headcount but to increase drama, which in turn makes you visit Twitter more, which in turn leads to more ad impressions and money for Twitter. As EM tweeted, more people have visited Twitter now than ever before. I just deleted my account when I understood what was going on.
homeland221 4y ago
Crypto. Twitter as an ad agency business has not much room to expand. You just have to look at the team EM assembled. EM himself was paypal founder. Many others on his investment teams are related to payment as well...even Jack has his square. Think about it, tweeter turn into like wechat with built in payment wallet especially crypto wallets managing like an exchange by a paypal founder who happen to have good access to government relationship. With expected tsunami of retrenchments coming especially for IT sectors, EM can afford to replace entire current Twitter engineers several time over - cheaper and more efficient. Most of those tweeters tech staff seems to be very obvilious of the incoming tech layoffs. FB along expected to let go about 30K (at least 2 more rounds in 2023). Google doing their 10K. Netflix and MS expected to hit that number as well before end of 2023. The labour market will be full of very good devs out of job. Can see that? When one is desperate with tons of bills to pay, no matter how much one despise EM, one will swallow the pride and work for him. Remember EM has access to vast amount of economic data (see who his friends are). He knows what is going on and how much leverage on his side vs entire tech community. It isnt lose-lose situation...mostly rank and yank situation done with maximum drama.
- pjc50 4y ago
  If he goes in on crypto - which even Facebook couldn't touch - while the smoking crater of FTX is still being litigated? That's not going to work.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". There is no opportunity to "go hardcore" for the kind of devs that build greenfield crap at lightning speed and leave spaghetti in their wake. Elon appears to intend to slice and dice his way to profitability like a textbook MBA. In order to support that there is opportunity for architects, engineers and process specialists who are skilled at hacking existing stuff together to make square pegs fit in round holes well enough to work and with minimal expenditure of engineering man hours. There are few of these people because it's not a skillset that the traditional software engineering trade really values and pushes people toward and fewer still who fit that category and want to work 50+hr weeks, and fewer still because pre-Elon Twitter isn't the kind of place these people thrive and so most would have self-selected out.
xfitm3 4y ago
jefurii 4y ago
Not a fan of Elon but it does look like Twitter had some serious problems that did need to be fixed. Like not having plans for dealing with cold-boot situations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593122

snoot 4y ago

pschuegr 4y ago

I guess, if you buy the premise that cash flow is problem number one and the company needs a significant pivot, then going into crunch-mode and trying to turn the ship as quickly as possible (at the cost of technical and, uh, sleep debt) is a reasonable solution. Maybe not the best, but reasonable. But it's pretty transparent that the cash flow problem is pretty much a problem because the new owner doesn't really want to own Twitter, or believe it can pay for itself; he wants to own a different product which has as many users as Twitter did. No judgement here, I don't necessarily think he's wrong. But why as an employee would I feel obligated to make his choices my problem?

mcphage 4y ago
> I guess, if you buy the premise that cash flow is problem number one Well, luckily you don't need to buy the premise that cash flow was problem number one—after he bought it, he saddled it with so much debt that it definitely became problem number one!
- pschuegr 4y ago
  Aha, so overpaying _was_ just part of a grand scheme to light a fire under the employees and the fanboys are right that he's playing 6d chess?
  - mcphage 4y ago
    6d? Those are rookie numbers!
    - pschuegr 4y ago
      Fine, 44b then.

DoesntMatter22 4y ago

You know the butterfly effect where one small decision affects tens of thousands of other things? That must have been the day that things were going to well at Tesla, record profits, etc, that Musk got bored and decided he only likes to work under unbearable pressure. So, he made a couple of insulting tweets and now here we are. I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size. Immediately starts by threatening advertisers, retweets that story about Pelosi's husband, fires people (probably needed to be done) and then this crazy scheme. The problem as someone else mentioned is that for Tesla and SpaceX those were really the only two places where you could work if you wanted to do electric cars or space stuff. So they attracted very dedicated people. Twitter is just web dev stuff and these people can work anywhere. It's not a great time to look for a job but when you get a lot of middle aged people who don't necessarily want to upend their life for their job especially when it was extremely cushy before, well, it's bound to be a problem. I do think he'll probably pull this off but it's gonna be a pretty miserable road.

justapassenger 4y ago
Problem is that Elon’s ego is much much much bigger than how smart he is . And the gap has been growing for last few years really fast. He really believes he’s smartest guy on earth, god’s gift to humanity and he has moral obligation to achieve whatever he wants to.
- kmonsen 4y ago
  This is true, and it also mostly says something about his ego not about how smart he is. No humans were ever smart enough to match that ego. That being said I think he is being overly underestimated right now. Clearly he can bring something positive based on history.
  - snoopy_telex 4y ago
    I think he's made a major mis-step with twitter though. SpaceX/Tesla employees work as hard as they do because they believe in the mission of the company. They're willing to just buckle down and do amazing things beyond most people. Twitter had a lot of normal employees, however, it also already had the true believers in the mission. Those people don't seem to have bought Musk's vision and they're leaving the company. He wanted to get just down to those folks, but I think by and large, they're gone. I don't know that he can recover from that mis-step. He needed to come in, explain his vision and got the true believers onboard before he cleaned house IMHO.

phire 4y ago

> I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Twitter board. They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. The offer to buy the company outright might have been more spite than anything else. I think he calmed down and realised what a bad idea his offer was (especially at that price), and then spent the next month or so trying to back out. The second time? Well, he was kind of trapped and was actually forced to buy it. The twitter board were suing him to hold him to the binding deal to buy at $44 billion that he signed. He only finalised the deal to avoid the lawsuit. It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.

ceejayoz 4y ago
> They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. That's certainly looking like it was the right call.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I don’t think so. I think although Elon is poorly managing Twitter. What we are seeing is how poorly managed Twitter was behind closed doors. Years of technical debt and no movement or improvements. Sounds like people were just getting over paid and producing very little. Atleast that’s what it seems like from all the ex employees ranting on Twitter about being fired.
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    Maybe... But not all tech debt is bad. As long as it's not holding you back and you are making deliberate choices. Twitter may have been badly managed, but it was consistent in experience. And in a large way that is a valuable product/feature itself. Elon will change things enough that it won't be like what it was, a giant distributed broadcast platform. I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. He seems to be very badly advised at the moment. It's going to lead to a elon against the world situation where he wrecks something everyone likes and he's tarnished forever. He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.

generationP 4y ago

Looks like EM is riven between "make Twitter an open platform for all opinions" and "burn Twitter down". Both good aims, but a mixed strategy does not lead anywhere good.

coffeebeqn 4y ago
This is a completely absurd plan from one person. Especially as egoistic as Musk. He never wanted it to be a free speech platform. Just more pleasing to his opinions
- brookst 4y ago
  Well yeah. Who in their right mind would want free speech for those they disagree with? /s
1attice 4y ago
..."both are good aims"? rubs face
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

furyofantares 4y ago

> What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it. I believe the thesis is he thinks it's possible to duplicate WeChat as a ubiquitous everything-app (news, media, social media, payments, ordering in restaurants, shopping, messaging) in the West. Why someone would believe that, I don't know. I imagine thinking you could also be the owner of it might motivate believing it can happen somewhat. I suppose the other thesis is that Twitter was horribly mismanaged and can work on far fewer resources to do more if he runs it like Space X or Tesla. That seems plausible to me though in this case it's beyond me why he thinks the actions he's taken will get him there.

kmonsen 4y ago
If he can replicate WeChat this could be a good deal even if current Twitter flashes out in the process. I’m not sure how Twitter is helping in creating WeChat for the rest of the world.
- majani 4y ago
  WeChat solved a problem specific to the Chinese market, given how it's internet market is structured. In the rest of the world, that problem is solved at an OS or browser level. And buying either of those would have been way cheaper than $44 billion
  - kmonsen 4y ago
    I agree with the first two sentences, but not sure how you think buying a browser or OS would be cheaper. Facebook tried hard and could not do it with a way bigger war chest. Google spent significant money into Android and Chrome (I have worked for both so not impartial). The thing is with both OS and browser is that they are really long term efforts and I am not sure if Elon could pull that of anymore. For sure Elon from 10 years ago could, but not sure if he has the patience anymore. Same with Zuck, I don't think he has the patience for what he is trying to achieve.
kibwen 4y ago

datavirtue 4y ago

Those damn pens. They are making some healthy people lose their shit when used a bit too heavily. I'm worried about those with PTSD and other trauma being "prescribed" this stuff, honestly. THC vape pen use needs to be studied in-depth. Dangerous. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7757764/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7757764/

dmonitor 4y ago
I don't see the relevance

throw2022110401 4y ago

Not to mention the fucking insulting assumption that people were not already working hard. During my tour (left years ago) there have been many time periods when I worked my ass off. I ended up leaving because of the total burn-out and the effect it started to have on my health. Despite that even years later I played with the idea of going back someday. No chance of that now of course. So sad to see it end this way.

camjohnson26 4y ago
Do you have an opinion on all the people who are saying that Twitter had too many engineers but never delivered anything?
- melondusk 4y ago
  I suppose they are asserting that some folks who delivered a product valued at over 40 billion dollars didn't actually deliver anything. That would actually make sense somewhere on social media.

ehnto 4y ago

It makes sense if you just fired 50% of your workforce. Although I could never quite figure out what so many people were doing on the product I imagine, in that 50% of staff were some pretty important roles, that now need their hours covered. I do not considered this fair, ethical or very smart. Just imagine all the tribal knowledge that just vanished. Twitter ought to hope they kept enough of the right infrastructure people around to actually keep the site up.

rodgerd 4y ago

> It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. Yet another one of his relationships burned down and this time his ex is with a trans lady. One of his kids went to court to kick him out of her life while doing the paperwork for her name change. He's been a shitty husband and a shitty father, but instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a decent psychologist he's decided that "woke twitter" are to blame because they kicked a transphobic comedian off the site, and he's spiraled out of control since then. He'd literally rather burn $44 billion dollars than admit that he has shortcomings. Or face a background check on his alleged university credentials.

mandeepj 4y ago

> I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. He lives off Twitter. His fame and fortune would not be where it’s without Twitter and he very well knows it. You can label that an emotional connection or even personal. I don’t think he out right planned to buy it. One thing after another, he found himself locked into - buying it.

nocoiner 4y ago
Well, yes. After he presented an acquisition agreement to the Twitter board of directors and presented them with a committed financing package, the Twitter board literally could not refuse Musk’s without spending the rest of their lives in depositions with Twitter public shareholders. So Twitter of course accepted the deal, Musk (voluntarily) signed the merger agreement, and that was that - he was indeed locked into buying the company (subject to certain conditions - receipt of regulatory approvals, Twitter shareholders approving the merger, stuff like that). This was not like hitting a lucky streak at the craps table and waking up 12 hours later with a new wife. The decision to purchase was deliberate. Doesn’t mean he didn’t develop buyer’s remorse after - he most certainly did - but the threatened tender offer, the rich, target-friendly merger agreement - this is exactly how you aggressively and deliberately pursue ownership of a big public company.
- pschuegr 4y ago
  Basically, his business skills got ahead of his capacity to self-regulate. Flawlessly executed the wrong plan.
  - nocoiner 4y ago
    Well said! He flawlessly executed on a bear hug acquisition strategy. Unfortunately… he turned out not to be the bear.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    I think I could have bought twitter for $44B too.

andyjda 4y ago

>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor. Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website. Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas. Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue

torginus 4y ago
> By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website. And Uber is a tech company because its a taxi service with an app. And Airbnb is tech company because its a house renting company with an app. etc.
phowat 4y ago
By that definition no tech company is a tech company. People search things on google because they want to find information , not because of the algorithms that bring that information. People use stable diffusion because they want to create images , whatever the cool ai technology behind it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bboygravity 4y ago

> What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it. Have you ever used Twitter? To someone who has used Twitter in the past weeks this reads like deliberate trolling. Twitter was absolutely terrible to use and the pace of noticible change within days/weeks under Elon is mind blowing to me. He's clearly going fast with things like getting rid of (shadow-)banning for no apparent reason, getting rid of banning anything of a certain political flavor, making Twitter faster (both in browser as well as on Android), getting rid of fake scammer accounts who deliberately impersonated famous people and companies to scam people, getting rid of bots and spam which where a HUGE problem (still are until the transition to verified is done) and so on. I mean getting rid of politically flavored sensorship alone will have a massive impact globally for something like Twitter. That alone was obviously very terrible to many people before Musk. PS: since you said you don't understand what his vision is. My best guess: it's to create a platform that competes with click-bait sponsored propaganda journalism. In the form of citizen journalism on Twitter. I think it could work and I also think there's a huge need for it as traditional journalism is dead in my opinion.

astrange 4y ago
> He's clearly going fast with things like getting rid of (shadow-)banning for no apparent reason (He thinks this is happening because he reads his replies and a lot of cranks convinced they're shadow banned are @ing him.) > getting rid of fake scammer accounts who deliberately impersonated famous people and companies to scam people (He made it worse and the big advertisers canceled their campaigns after their stock falling due to fake announcements.)

Taniwha 4y ago

The way I see it Elon boasted 'hardcore!' .... and most of Twitter's employees called his bluff, now he's screwed. All this is really because he doesn't really understand his business - what he's selling is access to Twitter's user's attention .... and he's alienated them all because he thinks it's all about technology

DonHopkins 4y ago

>It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. The entire and obvious and openly stated point of Musk buying Twitter was to reinstate Trump, and re-inflict his regular unhinged sociopathic tweets and lies and misinformation and calls to violence and bullying and hate speech and racism upon everyone in the world again, just when we were all getting used to enjoying not hearing from him every single fucking day and the middle of the night. There's no other rational explanation, and although that obvious explanation may sound completely irrational, so is Musk, and it is still the real reason, and the inextricable consequence, just as predicted by Occam's Razor, and foretold by Musk's own words. There's nothing bewildering about it at all, so stop acting so surprised, and pretending he changed his mind after what he said so emphatically and unambiguously. It's not like it's a secret, or contested. He openly announced it. When people show you who they are and what they'll do, believe them. https://www.voanews.com/a/elon-musk-says-he-d-reinstate-trump-s-twitter-account-/6565834.html https://www.voanews.com/a/elon-musk-says-he-d-reinstate-trum... >Elon Musk Says He'd Reinstate Trump's Twitter Account >"I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump," Musk said. "I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice." >Musk added that Trump's ban was "morally wrong and flat-out stupid." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/28/twitter-donald-trump-return-elon-musk-takeover-civil-rights https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/28/twitter-d... >Twitter braces for Donald Trump’s return as Elon Musk takes over platform >Hate speech and misinformation experts are bracing for the return of Donald Trump to the platform, as Elon Musk completes his acquisition of Twitter.

benj111 4y ago

They've lost 50%+ of their staff. They'll have to go 'hardcore' just to stand still.

denton-scratch 4y ago
They've probably already lost 95% of the 'hardcore' people. If you're good, and EM's threatening to fire everyone, then you get another job. The people who've stayed are presumably makeweights and time-servers.

randomsearch 4y ago

His stated thesis is to turn it an “everything app”. Hardcore engineering may be needed to pivot and get to profitability. https://www.reuters.com/technology/what-is-an-everything-app-why-does-elon-musk-want-make-one-2022-10-05/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/what-is-an-everything-app...

siggen 4y ago

This was more to reduce headcount but to increase drama, which in turn makes you visit Twitter more, which in turn leads to more ad impressions and money for Twitter. As EM tweeted, more people have visited Twitter now than ever before. I just deleted my account when I understood what was going on.

homeland221 4y ago

Crypto. Twitter as an ad agency business has not much room to expand. You just have to look at the team EM assembled. EM himself was paypal founder. Many others on his investment teams are related to payment as well...even Jack has his square. Think about it, tweeter turn into like wechat with built in payment wallet especially crypto wallets managing like an exchange by a paypal founder who happen to have good access to government relationship. With expected tsunami of retrenchments coming especially for IT sectors, EM can afford to replace entire current Twitter engineers several time over - cheaper and more efficient. Most of those tweeters tech staff seems to be very obvilious of the incoming tech layoffs. FB along expected to let go about 30K (at least 2 more rounds in 2023). Google doing their 10K. Netflix and MS expected to hit that number as well before end of 2023. The labour market will be full of very good devs out of job. Can see that? When one is desperate with tons of bills to pay, no matter how much one despise EM, one will swallow the pride and work for him. Remember EM has access to vast amount of economic data (see who his friends are). He knows what is going on and how much leverage on his side vs entire tech community. It isnt lose-lose situation...mostly rank and yank situation done with maximum drama.

pjc50 4y ago
If he goes in on crypto - which even Facebook couldn't touch - while the smoking crater of FTX is still being litigated? That's not going to work.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". There is no opportunity to "go hardcore" for the kind of devs that build greenfield crap at lightning speed and leave spaghetti in their wake. Elon appears to intend to slice and dice his way to profitability like a textbook MBA. In order to support that there is opportunity for architects, engineers and process specialists who are skilled at hacking existing stuff together to make square pegs fit in round holes well enough to work and with minimal expenditure of engineering man hours. There are few of these people because it's not a skillset that the traditional software engineering trade really values and pushes people toward and fewer still who fit that category and want to work 50+hr weeks, and fewer still because pre-Elon Twitter isn't the kind of place these people thrive and so most would have self-selected out.

xfitm3 4y ago

jefurii 4y ago

Not a fan of Elon but it does look like Twitter had some serious problems that did need to be fixed. Like not having plans for dealing with cold-boot situations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593122