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Do you remember when he bought Twitter and fired everyone, and the mass media and employee outcry was that a) the service would stop working and b) he would ban
by sebmellen 8d ago
Do you remember when he bought Twitter and fired everyone, and the mass media and employee outcry was that a) the service would stop working and b) he would bankrupt the company, yet a few years later it’s massively more successful than Twitter ever was as a public business?
Regardless your thoughts on Elon, his drug habits, and his political brashness, I don’t think you can say he’s in any way close to the Oceangate guy. There is something legitimately special about him and his collective.
- WalterBright 8d agoApparently 90% of the Twitter staff were simply baggage.
- senordevnyc 8d agoUh, no, I do not remember how Twitter is massively more successful than it was as a public business. Can you enlighten me?
- AdamN 8d agoTwitter is definitely not more successful now than before. So many people left and are gone forever. I would read a deep dive though into the history of Twitter (with the financials) to understand better and I do get that for a single product company there really is a point at which you give up on finding the next big thing and just optimize on your main thing and you really just need a few dozen awesome people and a rotation of new hires to keep things rolling but not thousands of engineers.
- sebmellen 8d agoMaybe I’m overstating “massively more successful” but to my understanding “X” has roughly twice the active use count that Twitter did, although that includes Grok. That said, do you remember these kinds of articles? > Musk summons engineers to Twitter HQ as millions await platform’s collapse Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/18/twitter-death-watch-chaos-resignations/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/18/twitter... > “Former Twitter employees fear the platform might only last weeks.” Melissa Ingle: “I don’t see how it lasts the month.” “All signs point to some catastrophic failure of the system, and very soon.” Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063467/former-twitter-employees-fear-the-platform-might-only-last-weeks/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063467/former-t... > Twitter ‘to lose 32m users in two years after Elon Musk takeover’ Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/twitter-lose-users-elon-musk-takeover-hate-speech https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/twitter-l... Elon was firing people left and right and literally physically destroying Twitter’s data centers. I remember hundreds of these hysterical articles and tweets that very clearly did not come to pass. He obviously did something more clever than the authors of these articles expected… is all I’m claiming.
- imtringued 8d agoI haven't posted anything on this HN submission yet, but all I'm claiming is that Twitter was so successful under Elon's management that he thought it was better to roll it into SpaceX than to keep it independent. Kind of like solar city was merged into Tesla to bail it out and then it winded down after the acquisition while nobody is looking. Just claiming, you know.
- sebmellen 7d agoYes, and Tesla and SpaceX are both ridiculously overvalued by any fair measure. But we can separate the financial inanity of his empire from the question, which is whether Elon is a capable engineering mind or simply an ‘Isaacson puff piece recipient’.
- WalterBright 7d agoIsaacson could write the puffiest puff piece about me and I'd still never become a trillionaire.
- WalterBright 7d agoMerging his companies into one will also reduce his workload. It's a sensible thing to do, regardless of their profitabilities.
- jurgenburgen 8d ago> yet a few years later it’s massively more successful than Twitter ever was as a public business? Twitter has certainly been a glowing success at becoming a right-wing propaganda chamber for Musk but as a commercial venture not really. Revenue is down 60% since Musk bought it. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-approach-advertisers-revenue-spacex-x-twitter-2026-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-approach-advertise...
- WalterBright 8d agoThe article doesn't mention subscription revenue. I subscribed to X in order to not see ads.
- somenameforme 7d agoIt also doesn't factor in the dramatically reduced costs. It's likely that X is already significantly more profitable than Twitter was. And with less dependency on advertisers, which is a huge win in and of itself.
- Decabytes 7d agoHe also unbanned a lot of people and got Trump back, got to ride the AI wave with Grok, pushed paid subscriptions and implemented paying people for tweeting. I would argue growing the platform by bringing back people that were brought back for violating the original rules is not a win. Nor is attracting people to the platform that follow those people, Nor is riding the AI train. And even with all of that, the new users, the AI, the paid subscriptions, None none of that actually fixed the major underlying issues that Twitter is not profitable. Jack Dorsey couldn’t fix it and neither did Elon. I think he just realized having a modern media platform he controls is more powerful than it making money. He inherited a platform built by someone else, and keeps the lights on with a skeleton crew. I don’t see that as a success
- WalterBright 7d agoX is the 13th largest social media platform with 650m monthly active users. Sounds like a success to me.
- pohl 7d agoBut whose success is it? Twitter was ranked 13th largest in 2021 before he bought it. Let that sink in.
- WalterBright 7d agoTwitter had 362 million monthly users in 2021. X has 650 million today. Looks like X has done well.
- pohl 6d agoMoving the goalpost metric from rank to MAUs just to make sure you can properly glaze the fascist. Nice.
- frankvdwaal 6d agoI would also question the reliability of the sources. Who said so? Are they comparing the right numbers? For example, in 2021 Twitter didn't report monthly users, but "monetisable daily active users", a metric that Musk did not understand. I think that 650 million of X comes from a report of the SEC, but it also includes just users of Grok, not just the social media section. So it's a different type of user, over a different time period, for a different service.
- Arainach 7d ago> I don’t think you can say he’s in any way close to the Oceangate gu They both have loud, stupid, and obviously wrong ideas about how hard diving in the sea is or isn't.
- xondono 7d agoYes, Twitter is so “successful” Musk had to write off 50% of his “investment” out of the gate, and had to come up with an AI-hyped merger with SpaceX to compensate the banks that went in with him. The only reason Twitter has more active users is that it removed some of the protections for bots, in particular broad filtering coming from certain country involved in a war. You don’t think Musk is any close to the Oceangate guy? Let’s review some interesting decisions by his companies then: - Musk mucking around with the blue checks and the bot filters in Twitter skyrocketed the amount of scams in the platform. - Tesla uses very strict NDAs and settlement to silence the reporting of accidents - The infamous electric door handle that locks up Teslas when power goes out was an obvious point of failure, it was ignored, people died, and now several countries have legislation against it - Reportedly Musk had safety lines and other safety features in the factories removed for serious reasons like “not liking yellow” - Any understanding of how to parse public insurance data will show you Tesla’s have accident rates that are multiples of other brands - The Starship, a vessel that is intended for human transport, has no safe abort system, no way to fit one in its current state, and no plans to modify that. Just a reminder that even a very SpaceX-friendly count (in which flights that did not attempt to land are considered “good”) puts the current reliability rate at <40%. As a naive boundary, for clearing the 97.5% predicted crew survival, SpaceX would need to fly in the order of 300 good Starship launches. Those are just of the top of my head.
- ETH_start 7d agoIndependent web traffic analysis shows that the average X user spends 12 to 14 minutes on the site. It's impossible that these are bots.
- xondono 6d agoAre you seriously claiming that as a fact? You really believe 12 minutes is too long for a bot or something? Because that has to be the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard. Measuring bot activity became harder after the API changes (I wonder why!), but there’s been some attempts at finding ways to estimate bot activity. All those measures are compatible with increases in bot activity, and incompatible with bot decline.
- greedo 7d agoConsidering he wanted to rescue those poor kids trapped in an underwater cave by building a submarine, the parallels are closer than you'd think...
- WalterBright 6d agoI cannot imagine anything more dastardly than collecting his best engineers together to design & build a device to save the kids.