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Fiction: >In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought Fact: The site has repeatedly had significant technical is

Fiction: >In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought Fact: The site has repeatedly had significant technical issues since he took over, with repeated down time, massive waves of complaints from top users about flakey behaviour. Fiction: > that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship Fact: His first move at Twitter resulted in a collapse in ad revenue and massive stock market shocks for companies as impersonators announced new policies on the platform. Since then he has taken far more overarching, far more capricious, moderation decisions than the previous management. Fiction: >and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising. Fact: Twitter revenue is in freefall. The revenue from Twitter Blue is entirely inconsequential and the loss of ad revenue has completely eclipsed it. It is an open secret Musk is fundraising to cover his enormous losses. I think this tells us one very clear thing that we've known about the industry for a while. It operates on vibes not facts. Does everyone love the idea of a subscription based model rather than Ads? Sure! People were talking about that for years before Musk turned up. Does that mean Musk has succeeded? Fuck no! He's made an absolute mess of it. Welcome to Twitter Blue, perks include everyone on twitter thinking you're a mug for paying Elon Musk $8 for your brand new blue badge.

EFreethought 4y ago
I have heard through the grapevine that a lot of companies in SF/SV were hoarding employees they did not need to prevent competitors from getting them. Elon Era Twitter seems like a confirmation of that (or at least a data point). A lot of people thought Twitter would collapse immediately due to all the cuts. Granted, as you wrote, it isn't as good as it was, so he probably cut too much.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Again, it's been a theory for a long time that top companies like Google were hoarding talent, but there just isn't any evidence for it. Not least, because if that were the plan Google is doing a shockingly poor job of it. People are getting confused by the timing, but two things happened. 1: Elon Musk got angry that the Babylon Bee got kicked off twitter and became so online that he burnt $45Bn pursuing an unhinged vendetta. Separately to that interest rates suddenly went from a historic low to shooting up - the result being these high growth companies saw their forward returns crushed and their stock values cut in half, so the equation of "invest for growth" vs. "Return cash" tipped massively. It's easy to conflate these two things, but they really have nothing to do with each other, it just so happened that Musk managed to time it incredibly badly. Big Tech is responding to macro trends, Elon Musk is personally accusing his own employees of being pedophiles, there's a slight difference.

EFreethought 4y ago

I have heard through the grapevine that a lot of companies in SF/SV were hoarding employees they did not need to prevent competitors from getting them. Elon Era Twitter seems like a confirmation of that (or at least a data point). A lot of people thought Twitter would collapse immediately due to all the cuts. Granted, as you wrote, it isn't as good as it was, so he probably cut too much.

SilverBirch 4y ago
Again, it's been a theory for a long time that top companies like Google were hoarding talent, but there just isn't any evidence for it. Not least, because if that were the plan Google is doing a shockingly poor job of it. People are getting confused by the timing, but two things happened. 1: Elon Musk got angry that the Babylon Bee got kicked off twitter and became so online that he burnt $45Bn pursuing an unhinged vendetta. Separately to that interest rates suddenly went from a historic low to shooting up - the result being these high growth companies saw their forward returns crushed and their stock values cut in half, so the equation of "invest for growth" vs. "Return cash" tipped massively. It's easy to conflate these two things, but they really have nothing to do with each other, it just so happened that Musk managed to time it incredibly badly. Big Tech is responding to macro trends, Elon Musk is personally accusing his own employees of being pedophiles, there's a slight difference.