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I cannot see how it was a success. 1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error. 2. Enough users, who

I cannot see how it was a success. 1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error. 2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche. 3. The firings did not go well. X has struggled to ship new features and appears nowhere closer to the "everything app" Musk promised. It posts strange UUID error codes. The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes. 4. The capture of X by far-right agitators has led to long term brand damage for Tesla, Musk's most important business property. I can't see any positive outcome from it.

baobun 1y ago
I don't think DOGE would have happened without it. Maybe not even Trump winning the election. It wasn't good for the company but allowed Musk huge influence in politics and likely making it out with some really juicy data.
- acjohnson55 1y ago
  I give a lot more weight to the $250M Elon spent on the campaign.
  - energy123 1y ago
    Advertising works well on local races. But for POTUS, I don't believe it moves the needle much. The bigger factors are whether the large media players back you (Murdoch, Musk), whether social media personalities back you, and whether the foreign intelligence agencies back you in their spamouflage and information ops (e.g. via the Internet Research Agency).
    - dinkumthinkum 1y ago
      You don't think the left had all these things in their favor? You think the media are all far right wing conservatives? People like Rachel Maddow and Oprah, you might consider to be much more right wing than even Dick Cheney? You don't think maybe there might be some issues out there that people voted on and maybe saying "I'm a middle class kld" and "I'm speaking" on a loop just didn't do it for them? No, it must be Murdoch, because Soros is a relative pauper by comparison. Really?
  - kandesbunzler 1y ago
    [dead]
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    That was a factor, but his CV stating "I cut Twitter's expenses and staff by 80%" or however much was probably a big factor too. Of course, he's the only one actually bragging about that being a success. Twitter's takeover also helped him get a number of loyalist goons that he sent out to various US federal agencies to extract data from.
- notahacker 1y ago
  He doesn't seem particularly happy with how things are going with the new administration, and Trump seems to be enjoying the fall out rather more. As Elon himself acknowledged, to the extent he actually believed in cutting the deficit the Big Beautiful Bill is doing the opposite, and I'm pretty sure some of the cuts that actually are taking place are ones he isn't happy with. He could have gained valuable information and he certainly got to exact petty revenge on regulators that crossed him, but I'd have a hard time putting a higher valuation on that than the tangible revenue drops of some of his businesses, not to mention risk of repercussions. I also think Trump is remarkably easy to get close to for someone with Elon's money,came and social circles whilst spending a lot less, especially if he's offering unqualified endorsement. Don't forget DOGE was launched as a collab with a relatively minor Silicon Valley player whose other claim to fame was running against Trump...
makeitdouble 1y ago
Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk. I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.
- Centigonal 1y ago
  Whether or not X goes under is almost fully dependent on whether it services its debt. That debt is backstopped by Elon Musk, who has enough assets to service that debt for at least another few decades. Whether or not X goes under is almost entirely one man's choice.
  - raydev 1y ago
    The Twitter-purchase debt problem is a lot less relevant now that he's rolled X into xAI. Now X the app gets to tag along with a higher value AI company (or at least it is currently valued much higher due to investors dreaming big).
    - phs318u 1y ago
      Higher value AI company? Not for long if "mechahitler" keeps popping up.
      - raydev 1y ago
        Honestly, after years of hearing that Elon's mishaps and faceplants will actually have a meaningful impact, with no meaningful impact, I'm sure xAI will be fine as long as they stay somewhat competitive.
        notahacker 1y ago
        Isn't that the point though? In a market of multiple competently-executed chatbots, a entrant whose distinguishing feature is edgelordism isn't likely to stay competitive. There is a market for "like the other chat bots in terms of parsing instructions, but with clumsy ad hoc prompting to make it generate more racist output rather than less racist output" but it isn't a particularly lucrative one Cf Musk's other businesses with lockin effect or massive technical advantages, and in some cases where his politics are largely irrelevant
CivBase 1y ago
> It makes X an increasingly niche website. I did not use Twitter. I do not use X. I'm even less inclined to become a user after the Musk takeover. I don't even know anyone who is active on X. However, I still constantly get linked to tweets and see screenshots of tweets (or whatever they're called now). And I never see anything from competing platforms. X may be failing by many metrics, but in terms of popularity it is still the undisputed king of its market. It's by no means "niche".
- Lu2025 1y ago
  Yeah screenshots getting around is a funny metric but it's a good one. I see BlueSky picking up and occasionally Threads. Sometimes you can't tell where it's from due to crop.
- watwut 1y ago
  I domt see screenshots of tweeta anymore tho. That one defintely stopped in places where I go.
AirMax98 1y ago
> The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes. Thanks for putting this into words — I have also noticed this and felt that product decisions have been shaped by this force of institutional rot.
windvoder 1y ago
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deleted 1y ago
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goodkiwi 1y ago
Can confirm the frontend piece - there is previously available functionality that was removed from the ui that you can still access via the web api
biztos 1y ago
I’m pretty lazy about curating my feed, but I do a little. And I never see any porn bots and only rarely any spam accounts. Political stuff, yes, but I don’t mind and it’s not a ton, in fact my feed has a lot more insightful analysis than advocacy. I still get a lot of “breaking news” that I’d otherwise have to be very active on Facebook to get, especially regarding other countries. I guess that’s just TL;DR: YMMV, but I do think there are a lot of people on X who find it very useful and don’t run into the problems you listed. As for Elon’s overpayment, I have thought about actually paying for an account, which I never would have done on Old Twitter.
cryptoegorophy 1y ago
3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people. One thing I learned from this is to not trust so called “experts” or loud voices.
- Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago
  Crashing isn't the totality of unsupported code. I previously worked in a company where a goodly proportion of the back end product team was let go, and their system stayed running for two plus years without a single fix or update going in.
  - PicassoCTs 1y ago
    Proofing that it was a real good back end team..
    - sflicht 1y ago
      Not good at engineering their own job security
- motorest 1y ago
  > 3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people. I don't think you have a solid grasp on the problem. To start off, Twitter did experienced major outages that it never experienced before. Also, you hire and retain people when you need to implement changes. If your goal is to cease any form of investment in your platform, like rolling out a new product or providing a new service, then your responsibilities are limited to keep the business barely aflost while coasting. See it as a navy ship. You need full crew to perform all your missions, but mothballing the ship requires a skeleton crew. Here you are, boasting that a ship doesn't require more than a skeleton crew to be kept afloat. I mean, sure why not? But are you saying what you think you're saying?
  - dinkumthinkum 1y ago
bydlocoder 1y ago
Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes Anyway, what kind of features Twitter (or any social network for that matter) needs after it existed for so many years? Hacker News haven't changed a bit a it does what it does perfectly well
- motorest 1y ago
  > Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes You sound like someone completely oblivious to software development practices who somehow felt compelled to post opinions on software engineering. Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software. What matters is systems architecture and institutional knowledge of how things are designed to work. If you fire your staff, you lose institutional knowledge. Your choice of programming language does not bring it back.
  - varjag 1y ago
    From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much.
    - mrcarrot 1y ago
      Or alternatively (assuming that's true) he fired the people who thought about what they commit and kept those whose commit logs look like: "push feature WiP", "fix", "more fixes", "push", "maybe this works?"...
      - varjag 1y ago
        Reportedly a portion of them were thinking so hard they did not commit anything at all.
        1y ago
guappa 1y ago
> where the news happens It never was, despite what lazy journalists led people to believe.
b112 1y ago
This msy surprise you, but the average person doesn't even know who owns what tech platform. Not Meta or X or Google. They don't care either. Most don't even know Musk bought Twitter. To complete this thought, most users of X are siloed too. There is no "capture" of the platform, whatever thst means, for them. I agree that in some circles there may be brand damage,
mnky9800n 1y ago
X exists in other languages than english. it provides insight into non-english speaking places that other platforms owned by elon musk do not.
mapt 1y ago
Unfortunately, Bluesky has not taken off. The network effects of Twitter are too great to lose its journalists & public figures. What has happened instead is that we're back on Facebook. Errm... Threads by Instagram by Meta née Facebook. And it's reached a stage where public figure migration is actually becoming feasible. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-daily-app-users-new-data-shows/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail... Network effected spaces front-loaded by the power of Mark Zuckerberg, third richest person in the world, stand a chance.
- CPLX 1y ago
  Bluesky seems to be doing reasonably well all things considered. It’s active and relevant. They also seem to have a pulse and ship new features. Not saying it will emerge from being a niche thing and take over but it’s a pretty big niche. And Twitter is about half an inch from a platform ending meltdown at any time so it seems like the future isn’t yet set.
  - cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
  - 0_____0 1y ago
    I check in on bsky every now and then and I'm kind of surprised at how much is happening. My city posts bulletins there. I follow journos and some individuals I used to follow on twitter who migrated. There are shitposters. Idk why people think it's dead?
  - mapt 1y ago
    Bluesky only has a future as a Twitter replacement. There are strong network effects favoring high utility of the dominant platform. Take a look at the graph I linked. Threads drank Bluesky's milkshake.
    - CPLX 1y ago
      I have my doubts about how real that Threads traffic is. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an organic link to Threads or a business list a profile, I don’t even know what the icon looks like. Bluesky I am seeing all the time. Maybe that’s just anecdotal but given how frequently meta tries to trick me into clicking on a Threads link I have my suspicions about all that traffic.
brookst 1y ago
There an argument that he paid $44B to get a Us administration that would hugely advantage him and his companies. Certainly he’s made billions from contracts initiated by this administration and seen many regulatory difficulties removed. Of course it may all fall apart because everyone involved has the temperament of a five year old on a meth bender, but the basic “buy media to influence politics to multiply wealth” approach seems to have worked well.
- intended 1y ago
  The evidence is that Trumps win has more to do with the dynamics of the party+media symbiosis on the right side of the spectrum, than anything X did. If your media ecosystem can get away with selling narratives and conspiracies as facts, without any pushback, then this allows you to set the topics of discussion for any debate. Agenda setting power > platform power.
  - phatskat 1y ago
    > Agenda setting power > platform power The Alt-Right Playbook feels like a bummer version of XKCD for these discussions: [Control the Conversation](https://youtu.be/CaPgDQkmqqM https://youtu.be/CaPgDQkmqqM)
- monocasa 1y ago
  A US administration does not cost tens of billions. He paid $250M to the trump campaign making him the single largest donor of all time, and that's what let him buy the current admin. And that was close to 1% of what he paid for twitter.
karel-3d 1y ago
He did not make X "everything app" but X is still somehow still working, functioning, and somehow adding new features, even if they suck. Also it made him win an election.
ghaff 1y ago
From my perspective personal perspective, that whole category of social media has been destroyed. Pretty much no one I know/followed still posts. It’s gone from something I watched/posted very frequently to something I might glance at once in a very great while. And after initial flurries of interest neither Mastodon or Bluesky really achieved critical mass.
xnx 1y ago
1. Agreed. One of the worst timed purchases of all time. 2. Unfortunately, nothing has truly displaced Twitter. Is Meta even still trying with Threads? I don't see ads, but I have to wonder why any real company would risk advertising on Twitter. 3. Eh. As a casual user, I haven't noticed any difference. For a mostly finished product, there were probably were a bunch of overpaid do-nothings on staff. 4. TSLA stock price seems impervious to reality.

baobun 1y ago

I don't think DOGE would have happened without it. Maybe not even Trump winning the election. It wasn't good for the company but allowed Musk huge influence in politics and likely making it out with some really juicy data.

acjohnson55 1y ago
I give a lot more weight to the $250M Elon spent on the campaign.
- energy123 1y ago
  Advertising works well on local races. But for POTUS, I don't believe it moves the needle much. The bigger factors are whether the large media players back you (Murdoch, Musk), whether social media personalities back you, and whether the foreign intelligence agencies back you in their spamouflage and information ops (e.g. via the Internet Research Agency).
  - dinkumthinkum 1y ago
    You don't think the left had all these things in their favor? You think the media are all far right wing conservatives? People like Rachel Maddow and Oprah, you might consider to be much more right wing than even Dick Cheney? You don't think maybe there might be some issues out there that people voted on and maybe saying "I'm a middle class kld" and "I'm speaking" on a loop just didn't do it for them? No, it must be Murdoch, because Soros is a relative pauper by comparison. Really?
- kandesbunzler 1y ago
  [dead]
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  That was a factor, but his CV stating "I cut Twitter's expenses and staff by 80%" or however much was probably a big factor too. Of course, he's the only one actually bragging about that being a success. Twitter's takeover also helped him get a number of loyalist goons that he sent out to various US federal agencies to extract data from.
notahacker 1y ago
He doesn't seem particularly happy with how things are going with the new administration, and Trump seems to be enjoying the fall out rather more. As Elon himself acknowledged, to the extent he actually believed in cutting the deficit the Big Beautiful Bill is doing the opposite, and I'm pretty sure some of the cuts that actually are taking place are ones he isn't happy with. He could have gained valuable information and he certainly got to exact petty revenge on regulators that crossed him, but I'd have a hard time putting a higher valuation on that than the tangible revenue drops of some of his businesses, not to mention risk of repercussions. I also think Trump is remarkably easy to get close to for someone with Elon's money,came and social circles whilst spending a lot less, especially if he's offering unqualified endorsement. Don't forget DOGE was launched as a collab with a relatively minor Silicon Valley player whose other claim to fame was running against Trump...

makeitdouble 1y ago

Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk. I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.

Centigonal 1y ago
Whether or not X goes under is almost fully dependent on whether it services its debt. That debt is backstopped by Elon Musk, who has enough assets to service that debt for at least another few decades. Whether or not X goes under is almost entirely one man's choice.
- raydev 1y ago
  The Twitter-purchase debt problem is a lot less relevant now that he's rolled X into xAI. Now X the app gets to tag along with a higher value AI company (or at least it is currently valued much higher due to investors dreaming big).
  - phs318u 1y ago
    Higher value AI company? Not for long if "mechahitler" keeps popping up.
    - raydev 1y ago
      Honestly, after years of hearing that Elon's mishaps and faceplants will actually have a meaningful impact, with no meaningful impact, I'm sure xAI will be fine as long as they stay somewhat competitive.
      - notahacker 1y ago
        Isn't that the point though? In a market of multiple competently-executed chatbots, a entrant whose distinguishing feature is edgelordism isn't likely to stay competitive. There is a market for "like the other chat bots in terms of parsing instructions, but with clumsy ad hoc prompting to make it generate more racist output rather than less racist output" but it isn't a particularly lucrative one Cf Musk's other businesses with lockin effect or massive technical advantages, and in some cases where his politics are largely irrelevant

CivBase 1y ago

> It makes X an increasingly niche website. I did not use Twitter. I do not use X. I'm even less inclined to become a user after the Musk takeover. I don't even know anyone who is active on X. However, I still constantly get linked to tweets and see screenshots of tweets (or whatever they're called now). And I never see anything from competing platforms. X may be failing by many metrics, but in terms of popularity it is still the undisputed king of its market. It's by no means "niche".

Lu2025 1y ago
Yeah screenshots getting around is a funny metric but it's a good one. I see BlueSky picking up and occasionally Threads. Sometimes you can't tell where it's from due to crop.
watwut 1y ago
I domt see screenshots of tweeta anymore tho. That one defintely stopped in places where I go.

AirMax98 1y ago

> The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes. Thanks for putting this into words — I have also noticed this and felt that product decisions have been shaped by this force of institutional rot.

windvoder 1y ago

[dead]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

goodkiwi 1y ago

Can confirm the frontend piece - there is previously available functionality that was removed from the ui that you can still access via the web api

biztos 1y ago

I’m pretty lazy about curating my feed, but I do a little. And I never see any porn bots and only rarely any spam accounts. Political stuff, yes, but I don’t mind and it’s not a ton, in fact my feed has a lot more insightful analysis than advocacy. I still get a lot of “breaking news” that I’d otherwise have to be very active on Facebook to get, especially regarding other countries. I guess that’s just TL;DR: YMMV, but I do think there are a lot of people on X who find it very useful and don’t run into the problems you listed. As for Elon’s overpayment, I have thought about actually paying for an account, which I never would have done on Old Twitter.

cryptoegorophy 1y ago

3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people. One thing I learned from this is to not trust so called “experts” or loud voices.

Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago
Crashing isn't the totality of unsupported code. I previously worked in a company where a goodly proportion of the back end product team was let go, and their system stayed running for two plus years without a single fix or update going in.
- PicassoCTs 1y ago
  Proofing that it was a real good back end team..
  - sflicht 1y ago
    Not good at engineering their own job security
motorest 1y ago
> 3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people. I don't think you have a solid grasp on the problem. To start off, Twitter did experienced major outages that it never experienced before. Also, you hire and retain people when you need to implement changes. If your goal is to cease any form of investment in your platform, like rolling out a new product or providing a new service, then your responsibilities are limited to keep the business barely aflost while coasting. See it as a navy ship. You need full crew to perform all your missions, but mothballing the ship requires a skeleton crew. Here you are, boasting that a ship doesn't require more than a skeleton crew to be kept afloat. I mean, sure why not? But are you saying what you think you're saying?
- dinkumthinkum 1y ago

bydlocoder 1y ago

Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes Anyway, what kind of features Twitter (or any social network for that matter) needs after it existed for so many years? Hacker News haven't changed a bit a it does what it does perfectly well

motorest 1y ago
> Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes You sound like someone completely oblivious to software development practices who somehow felt compelled to post opinions on software engineering. Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software. What matters is systems architecture and institutional knowledge of how things are designed to work. If you fire your staff, you lose institutional knowledge. Your choice of programming language does not bring it back.
- varjag 1y ago
  From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much.
  - mrcarrot 1y ago
    Or alternatively (assuming that's true) he fired the people who thought about what they commit and kept those whose commit logs look like: "push feature WiP", "fix", "more fixes", "push", "maybe this works?"...
    - varjag 1y ago
      Reportedly a portion of them were thinking so hard they did not commit anything at all.
      - 1y ago

guappa 1y ago

> where the news happens It never was, despite what lazy journalists led people to believe.

b112 1y ago

This msy surprise you, but the average person doesn't even know who owns what tech platform. Not Meta or X or Google. They don't care either. Most don't even know Musk bought Twitter. To complete this thought, most users of X are siloed too. There is no "capture" of the platform, whatever thst means, for them. I agree that in some circles there may be brand damage,

mnky9800n 1y ago

X exists in other languages than english. it provides insight into non-english speaking places that other platforms owned by elon musk do not.

mapt 1y ago

Unfortunately, Bluesky has not taken off. The network effects of Twitter are too great to lose its journalists & public figures. What has happened instead is that we're back on Facebook. Errm... Threads by Instagram by Meta née Facebook. And it's reached a stage where public figure migration is actually becoming feasible. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-daily-app-users-new-data-shows/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail... Network effected spaces front-loaded by the power of Mark Zuckerberg, third richest person in the world, stand a chance.

CPLX 1y ago
Bluesky seems to be doing reasonably well all things considered. It’s active and relevant. They also seem to have a pulse and ship new features. Not saying it will emerge from being a niche thing and take over but it’s a pretty big niche. And Twitter is about half an inch from a platform ending meltdown at any time so it seems like the future isn’t yet set.
- cindyllm 1y ago
  [dead]
- 0_____0 1y ago
  I check in on bsky every now and then and I'm kind of surprised at how much is happening. My city posts bulletins there. I follow journos and some individuals I used to follow on twitter who migrated. There are shitposters. Idk why people think it's dead?
- mapt 1y ago
  Bluesky only has a future as a Twitter replacement. There are strong network effects favoring high utility of the dominant platform. Take a look at the graph I linked. Threads drank Bluesky's milkshake.
  - CPLX 1y ago
    I have my doubts about how real that Threads traffic is. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an organic link to Threads or a business list a profile, I don’t even know what the icon looks like. Bluesky I am seeing all the time. Maybe that’s just anecdotal but given how frequently meta tries to trick me into clicking on a Threads link I have my suspicions about all that traffic.

brookst 1y ago

There an argument that he paid $44B to get a Us administration that would hugely advantage him and his companies. Certainly he’s made billions from contracts initiated by this administration and seen many regulatory difficulties removed. Of course it may all fall apart because everyone involved has the temperament of a five year old on a meth bender, but the basic “buy media to influence politics to multiply wealth” approach seems to have worked well.

intended 1y ago
The evidence is that Trumps win has more to do with the dynamics of the party+media symbiosis on the right side of the spectrum, than anything X did. If your media ecosystem can get away with selling narratives and conspiracies as facts, without any pushback, then this allows you to set the topics of discussion for any debate. Agenda setting power > platform power.
- phatskat 1y ago
  > Agenda setting power > platform power The Alt-Right Playbook feels like a bummer version of XKCD for these discussions: [Control the Conversation](https://youtu.be/CaPgDQkmqqM https://youtu.be/CaPgDQkmqqM)
monocasa 1y ago
A US administration does not cost tens of billions. He paid $250M to the trump campaign making him the single largest donor of all time, and that's what let him buy the current admin. And that was close to 1% of what he paid for twitter.

karel-3d 1y ago

He did not make X "everything app" but X is still somehow still working, functioning, and somehow adding new features, even if they suck. Also it made him win an election.

ghaff 1y ago

From my perspective personal perspective, that whole category of social media has been destroyed. Pretty much no one I know/followed still posts. It’s gone from something I watched/posted very frequently to something I might glance at once in a very great while. And after initial flurries of interest neither Mastodon or Bluesky really achieved critical mass.

xnx 1y ago

1. Agreed. One of the worst timed purchases of all time. 2. Unfortunately, nothing has truly displaced Twitter. Is Meta even still trying with Threads? I don't see ads, but I have to wonder why any real company would risk advertising on Twitter. 3. Eh. As a casual user, I haven't noticed any difference. For a mostly finished product, there were probably were a bunch of overpaid do-nothings on staff. 4. TSLA stock price seems impervious to reality.