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Has he really failed at Twitter? Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. Their business metrics were absolute crap for a business of their sca

by spaceman_2020 3y ago

Has he really failed at Twitter? Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. Their business metrics were absolute crap for a business of their scale and in the pandemic environment. The jury is still out if new Twitter has failed or not.

542458 3y ago
> Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. What metrics are you looking at? Pre-Musk Twitter didn't seem that badly run - it was profitable outside of a one-time court judgment.
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Their margin was 1% during the pandemic in 2020. If your mature social media site that’s been around for over a decade and has hundreds of millions of users has a 1% margin and effectively lost money in 2020, you’re not a well-run organization. To give you an idea of their incompetence, when you create a Twitter Ads account, you’re asked to choose your time zone. I’m in UTC+5:30. Except you can’t choose half hour increments, so I was forced to choose UTC+5:00. All the data and reports had the time error. My time zone is home to over 1.4 billion people. If your billion dollar corporation that depends on ads can’t even be bothered to fix the time zone selection for 1/6th of the world’s population in its flagship product, its not a well-run business.
mrguyorama 3y ago
Before his purchase, twitter was a company that had hope of profitability as a regular occurrence, if they could adjust some spend on infrastructure and engineering. That's a lot harder to do with a giant debt crushing your soul, by a guy who can't really put any extra money into it to give it runway. All of the changes Elon has made to twitter have been desperate attempts to get some cash to stay alive, because the company is in a desperate position. At one point, they were down something like 50% in ad spend. Not many places can survive with new billions in debt and half the revenue. I don't know if he has been able to convince advertisers to come back, but they are fickle, stupid, and have no memory so surely that's a possibility, and this new CEO might be an attempt to convince advertisers his hands are off the wheel.

542458 3y ago

> Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. What metrics are you looking at? Pre-Musk Twitter didn't seem that badly run - it was profitable outside of a one-time court judgment.

spaceman_2020 3y ago
Their margin was 1% during the pandemic in 2020. If your mature social media site that’s been around for over a decade and has hundreds of millions of users has a 1% margin and effectively lost money in 2020, you’re not a well-run organization. To give you an idea of their incompetence, when you create a Twitter Ads account, you’re asked to choose your time zone. I’m in UTC+5:30. Except you can’t choose half hour increments, so I was forced to choose UTC+5:00. All the data and reports had the time error. My time zone is home to over 1.4 billion people. If your billion dollar corporation that depends on ads can’t even be bothered to fix the time zone selection for 1/6th of the world’s population in its flagship product, its not a well-run business.

mrguyorama 3y ago

Before his purchase, twitter was a company that had hope of profitability as a regular occurrence, if they could adjust some spend on infrastructure and engineering. That's a lot harder to do with a giant debt crushing your soul, by a guy who can't really put any extra money into it to give it runway. All of the changes Elon has made to twitter have been desperate attempts to get some cash to stay alive, because the company is in a desperate position. At one point, they were down something like 50% in ad spend. Not many places can survive with new billions in debt and half the revenue. I don't know if he has been able to convince advertisers to come back, but they are fickle, stupid, and have no memory so surely that's a possibility, and this new CEO might be an attempt to convince advertisers his hands are off the wheel.