3 ms·

Aside from being a long-standing obsession of Musk's, the thing about the 'everything app' is that it's the Hail Mary move which could make the Twitter thing an

by gwern 3y ago

Aside from being a long-standing obsession of Musk's, the thing about the 'everything app' is that it's the Hail Mary move which could make the Twitter thing anything but a dumpster fire immolating $20b+, Musk's reputation, and several years of his rapidly-shortening QALYs. If you force as many people as possible to subscribe, you can then flip them to the 'everything app' and bootstrap a big enough bloc of customers to matter that you control their demand. (cf. Stratechery). It's not going to work, but it is the only story you can tell yourself and employees about how the Twitter saga ends in any way other than Musk losing interest and getting distracted by AI again and Twitter spiraling into the drain and possibly being dumped into bankruptcy by its debt load.

omegaworks 3y ago
>it's the Hail Mary move which could make the Twitter thing anything but a dumpster fire immolating $20b+ While Twitter wasn't making money hand over fist, it was bringing in $4,500million in ad revenue prior to the rebrand and had years where it was marginally profitable. Musk's saddling Twitter with interest on the debt he paid to buy the company is one of the reasons it's immolating money.
- gwern 3y ago
  Yeah, that's the problem. Buying it was so bad an idea and so overpriced that he had to load the blue bird down with debt. He can't just quit Twitter and toodle off and say 'well, I stopped wokeism, and that justifies destroying my reputation and 3 years even as my other ventures like Tesla run into major strategic problems while I was distracted'. So right now, Twitter is "default dead", as pg might put it. There is a viable business there... but not one that can service the Musk debt load indefinitely while enduring all the usual shocks & risks. So he's either got to put in a lot more money, tell a story which will get someone else to put in a lot more money, or lose it.
beede 3y ago
Doesn’t a bankrupt Twitter lead to someone else buying it for a fire sale price that presumably could just change it back to … Twitter?
- gwern 3y ago
  Yes.

by gwern 3y ago

omegaworks 3y ago

>it's the Hail Mary move which could make the Twitter thing anything but a dumpster fire immolating $20b+ While Twitter wasn't making money hand over fist, it was bringing in $4,500million in ad revenue prior to the rebrand and had years where it was marginally profitable. Musk's saddling Twitter with interest on the debt he paid to buy the company is one of the reasons it's immolating money.

gwern 3y ago
Yeah, that's the problem. Buying it was so bad an idea and so overpriced that he had to load the blue bird down with debt. He can't just quit Twitter and toodle off and say 'well, I stopped wokeism, and that justifies destroying my reputation and 3 years even as my other ventures like Tesla run into major strategic problems while I was distracted'. So right now, Twitter is "default dead", as pg might put it. There is a viable business there... but not one that can service the Musk debt load indefinitely while enduring all the usual shocks & risks. So he's either got to put in a lot more money, tell a story which will get someone else to put in a lot more money, or lose it.

beede 3y ago

Doesn’t a bankrupt Twitter lead to someone else buying it for a fire sale price that presumably could just change it back to … Twitter?

gwern 3y ago
Yes.