A question about Twitter and Elon Musk

[Yavin4]

I may be a simple, country lawyer...but it seems to me that Twitter's critical problem prior to Musk taking it over was its business model. The company was not generating enough revenue to satisfy investors. Do I have that right?

If I am right, then why is Musk doing battle with Twitter's engineers? Twitter's tech seems solid for the most part. It was built well seeing that it's still functioning after so many people have left.

Why isn't Musk solving their business model problem? I know he wanted to charge for the blue checks, but that was stupid. Anyone could have told them that.

Again, I may be a simple, country lawyer, and I welcome being set straight on this.

p.s. I am not a simple, country lawyer.

[C_U_L8R]

1. That's all Musk seems to know, if that

He certainly knows squat about running a sponsor-fueled media business.

[bullimiami]

2. Being just a tv lawyer myself it seems like musk injecting himself directly into policy

and running his giant yap online might open him up to legal issues.

[pwb]

3. Maybe it is still functioning after so many left because so

many left twitter?

[Yavin4]

4. It was functioning well before so many left.

The tech side of Twitter was never the problem. It was the business side that was the problem.

[Emrys]

9. Not that many have actually left.

I think a million or two might have cancelled their accounts, but I've not been keeping close track.

For perspective, before all this blew up, the UK alone was estimated to have 18 million active users.

[usonian]

5. I read some crazy speculation on Hacker News

But when you're dealing with a crazy person, why not?

The theory is that he is tearing down twitter to make it a payments system.
And WHY NOT? IIRC, he was one of the PayPal "mafia" (that's official slang, not my invention)
AND he has been rumored to be the IRL Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of blockchain.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33668165
Elon Has to Destroy Twitter

I wonder if he is destroying Twitter intentionally. No one could make so many bad (stupid, ignorant, mean, etc.) decisions in a row by accident without someone stepping in for the sake of investors. Maybe by bankrupting it he can get out of having to pay anyone back? Could this all just be for the sake of attention?

But maybe the math works out - get rid of 80% of the staff (though losing the payroll department seems like a needless complication), risk losing maybe 50% of the advertising, and suddenly there is profit again.

Twitter has to be torn down to be rebuilt as a payments system (__Crytter__: Crypto + Twitter) like he seems to want. I think this was a really shitty way to do it. No one with any self-respect is going to work for Twitter for any reason other than money now. Which it doesn't have yet.

If my non-technical manager asked me for screenshots of "salient code" that I've done and a bullet list of tasks I've completed in the last 6 months so we could have a technical interview, I'd know deep down in the cockles of my heart that nothing I show them is going to help either of us. They're incapable of understanding the technology and I'm incapable of not rolling my eyes hard enough to make noise. If working unpaid overtime at high levels of performance for an indefinite (but obviously lengthy) period of time is the cost of working for that manager, they can bloody do it themselves while I find a job where I am respected, not bent over and told to bring my own lube. And if these things are a direct result of them alienating and driving off my friends and coworkers with unannounced layoffs and unreasonable demands, then I'd be doubly sure to get my confident, self-respecting ass out of that martyr's chair and find a better opportunity (which will be a very low bar indeed at that point) as quickly as possible. Three months of severance is great (assuming it gets paid - I hate that I have to wonder how many people are going to get screwed out of it) and should be plenty of time to find something enjoyable.

[Tomconroy]

6. Before musk Twitter had about 500 million in debt which twitter

Could manage with the revenue it had. Musk slapped 13 billion in debt on Twitter to finance his absurd purchase price. With the revenue he has he can't pay the debt. It's that simple.

[Emrys]

7. Any rational person

who had splashed a totally ludicrous amount of money - his own and nominally that of backers and investors - on an organization would have spent the summer months, between when it finally dawned on him that withdrawing from buying Twitter was going to involve some time in court and some financial pain and the sale finally going through, carrying out some concerted due diligence.

Now, you could argue that a better time to do that would have been before making an offer in the first place, but we're in Muskworld here, and the laws of physics and economics are suspended when and as convenient.

Such due diligence would have included establishing:

* exactly where Twitter's cost centres were
* what assets it held (all that raw data available for analysis is said to be one of the most important for Twitter) and which were most valuable and offered the chance of returns in future (this includes staff assets)
* who its users were (this is the biggie)
* what they used it for
* what concerns they might have about changes to Twitter
* how much they valued access to it in absolute and money terms
* how all that could be forged into a package that might offer something people wanted enough to pay for, beyond the Blue Tick of Shame and preferably including an edit button, that they couldn't find elsewhere on better terms or that they weren't already enjoying on Twitter for free, and that advertisers might feel drawn to as a pool of potential customers in a stable, predictable environment that didn't jar horribly with their brands' images.

Instead, such little basic market research as he's carried out has been done in the last couple of weeks on the fly on open Twitter itself, and there's little indication he's even been listening.

Put basically, he had, and still has:

* a very sketchy idea of what he was actually buying
* very vague airy-fairy ideas about a Grand Plan
* next to no concrete ideas about what to do with it in the here and now
* a slim grasp of its users' money priorities
* not a clue about its technical functions and their legal ramifications
* far too little attention span to see any of his crackpot ideas through to anywhere near fruition, to the extent that an estimated 70% of his own Twitter followers may be bots, whereas his Great Sticking Point when trying to wriggle out of the sale was uncertainty over the number of said bots among Twitter members, and this was the first thing he was supposed to be going to tackle on the way to making Twitter The Most Reliable Crowdsourced Venue for Hard News and Information in the World Ever.

[Meowmee]

8. M is a crazy con artist

Who knows what his real motives were for doing anything.