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I agree. Two very different business responses between Musk and Zuck. I almost feel sorry for Zuck as we are witnessing meltdowns of two large companies in real

I agree. Two very different business responses between Musk and Zuck. I almost feel sorry for Zuck as we are witnessing meltdowns of two large companies in real-time. Musk just continues to dig his own grave… I feel bad for the ppl losing their jobs but that is a very generous severance package.

lvl102 4y ago
Zuck did it himself too. No one told him to go all-in on VR. No one. All he had to do was tackle payment and maybe cloud. He first went for crypto and then is in the process of failing with VR. Meta really needs to be in the cloud business.
- pavlov 4y ago
  FB briefly was in the cloud PaaS business when they acquired Parse. The problem is that the way Meta runs its data centers and software stack is tightly integrated with the products. It’s not really amenable to running third party applications or storing third party data.
  - oblio 4y ago
    Nobody's infra business is really neatly separated. If the will is there, it can be done.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    So, loosen the connection? Isn't that what thousands of engineers are for? Didn't Amazon do this originally? I'm not sure cloud is actually such a great thing for FB but if you're going to do it, that's an inevitable step, isn't it?
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Amazon’s infrastructure was also tightly integrated with its products. Despite the often repeated and very wrong myth that AWS was founded by Amazon selling its “excess capacity”, AWS was always created with a separate infrastructure that was purpose built to sell to other companies: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-how-amazon-s-web-service-started-just-won-t-die.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
  - mbreese 4y ago
    What about the concept of a data center inside a data center? Given their infrastructure size and necessary geographical layout, it should be possible to have a number of IaaS racks stored inside their existing data center footprint. If they have their own data centers (which I assume they do), this would make a lot of sense, kinda like a ghost kitchen — a virtual data center. That is, assuming they have the physical space to support something like this. It would be a way to diversify income with largely existing resources and vendor contracts. Imagine even a slimmed down service like fly.io or Cloudflare workers running at FB data center scale.
    - spydum 4y ago
      not a ton of market for that. and it changes the risk nature of their own facilities. already plenty of hyperscale datacenters with space to lease. what advantage does meta offer? surely they wont beat on price.
      - mbreese 4y ago
        It’s probably not worth the hassle to FB, but it is funny to think about how big of a business this could potentially be. But even a profitable business unit might not make enough profit to actually make it worthwhile. It could certainly work. But it would probably be too small a business for a company as large as Meta. The differences in scales is (I think) one of their problems. At Meta scale (somewhat a pun), many things are just harder/not worthwhile because of their size.
- whatyesaid 4y ago
  How would Meta win in the cloud business though?
  - lvl102 4y ago
    My opinion is that Meta has the best AI/ML infra in the business.
    - rippercushions 4y ago
      Both TikTok and Google (Tensorflow etc) would beg to differ on that.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    They don't need to win, they just need to be there as another option. Every business I've worked at has been huge on wanting cloud diversity of some sort, and tons of startups act as middle men on this. Another of the big boys offering a cloud product would guarantee it would pick up customers and give them another avenue they can plausibly hunt for competitive advantage in.
  - reilly3000 4y ago
    SMB. They are effectively the webmaster for a vast amount of very small business, but also Meta's ad platform ends up being one of the larger expenses for many businesses. In fact, I doubt there is a single entity on earth that has more billable B2B relationships. I agree that spinning up a pure-play public cloud makes no sense for Meta. Its not in their ethos, moreover selling various abstractions over virtualized compute is a commodity. Why would they get in line, behind IBM and Oracle? Given that Office 365 is being counted as 'Cloud' imagine what Meta could do with some $100/yr SMB service. On the enterprise end, they have some of the very best big data and ML infra and could do well to bundle up extra capacity sell that on a metered basis. If they had started offering managed Presto in 2015 this conversation wouldn't be happening. Their network infra (IP space, undersea cables, edge pops etc) is also rather vast and I could see a lot of SMB to F500 customers lining up to leverage it if bundled right. If they wanted to they could write a check for CloudFlare, I checked their balance sheet. Meta Cloudflare would be a juggernaut; so powerful that I pray the FTC wouldn't allow it. Historically Facebook has been allergic to B2B outside of selling ads. Even within it they bought and killed Atlas, effectively handing a monopoly on ad serving to Doubleclick. Now they are warming up to it, offering Workplace, Kustomer, and Oculus for enterprise. I think that the Metaverse could be a novel B2B play and so do they, calling it "The Future of Work". tl;dr: Meta could win the cloud business because it has the people, cash, differentiated tech, and existing relationships. They could beat AWS/GCP/Azure in many segments of IT spend by packaging their assets together into a novel kind of cloud.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  Agree on VR, payments, disagree on Cloud. It's a saturated market, there are half a dozen operators who each have unique selling points. I don't know what Meta's would be. Doubling down on becoming one of these "everything" apps could have been a good strategy. Become the app frontend for one of the less big food delivery companies in the FB app, tie in to payments. Perhaps even buy Square for Cash App and all the POS integrations to build a network of sellers, all tightly integrated from the consumer perspective into the Facebook app. I'd have hated it, but I suspect it could have worked.
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    It would have cratered their gross margins though, which would have meant a (potentially permanent) hit to the share price. I agree that it would have been a good strategy, but that's (presumably) why they never did it.
    - danpalmer 4y ago
      Interesting. Is that because payments are much lower margin than ads? Surely investors would be smart enough to see the additional revenue, and likely additional benefit to the ads business, as being worth it?
      - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
        Investors like standardized numbers apparently
    - lvl102 4y ago
      Payment has much higher multiple especially compared to FB. It’s quite literally the closest thing to printing money.
      - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
        It doesn't have the same margins as advertising.
- personjerry 4y ago
  You have to make big bets to continue winning. It's easy for us to sit in our armchairs and criticize their failures, but for example their plays with going mobile-first in 2008 and the acquisition of Instagram in 2012 worked out very well.
  - boxed 4y ago
    It's better to make many small bets and when they start to take off, THEN put the foot on the pedal. Zuck has been notoriously bad at creating new products, so betting the company on that he'll manage it this time seems like a very bad idea.
    - benjaminwootton 4y ago
      Buying Instagram was a real jaw dropping moment if I remember. $1 billion sounded like a lot of money back in the day!
    - sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
      How do you start a Tesla with small bets?
      - boxed 4y ago
        With the roadster. He also started SpaceX with Falcon 1, not Falcon 9, and certainly not Starship.
        sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
        That's a good point. The principle of proving a simple possible version makes sense. Just pointing out that those "small" steps Tesla took are already a lot bigger than most software projects.
        boxed 4y ago
        Mostly because those projects are badly mismanaged from before they even write the first line of code :P
- Moldoteck 4y ago
  I thought this problem is less related to vr and more related to ads revenue that dropped because of apple. vr was just a way to create a platform from the ground where ads will continue to be their business model
- cdiddy2 4y ago
  Their payment attempt was stifled by regulators though. I wonder where they would be at if they had launched Diem instead of shutting that down
- tech_tuna 4y ago
  I'm not looking to praise Zuck but he did at least try something new. That's how companies stay alive and vital and relevant. Innovation. He gambled big on VR and it didn't pay off. At least not yet. I don't think it will pay off but I have to respect that he went big on a new direction for the company. I still think Facebook is evil and I feel like they should have tried to buy Tik Tok although I don't know how feasible that ever was. >Meta really needs to be in the cloud business. That's an interesting idea.
  - optymizer 4y ago
    TikTok is a Chinese company bringing in mountains of data on US citizens, including the ability to influence what people in the US see on a daily basis. The Chinese government would never sell that kind of leverage to anyone, let alone to Facebook, which is banned in China.
    - system2 4y ago
      It is baffling why the U.S. government didn't ban TikTok. I'd rather zucc steal people's info than chinese ppl.
      - triyambakam 4y ago
        Because some and certain high ranking US officials are working with China
        LastTrain 4y ago
        Who?
        triyambakam 4y ago
        I don't know who, maybe Trump? Biden? But it wouldn't be allowed if some weren't allowing it.
- zulban 4y ago
  > No one told him to go all-in on VR. No one. You can't possibly know that. Try not to get caught up in your own speculation and speculation from pundits.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  AWS has the first mover advantage, Microsoft knows enterprise, Google has some awesome tech. I'm not sure what Meta could bring to the table?
  - randomsearch 4y ago
    100%. I do think there is room for another company though... but definitely not Facebook.
    - eitally 4y ago
      But there are other companies, who are already doing pretty well: Oracle, Alibaba/AliCloud, Hetzer, Digital Ocean, even Rackspace.
- erikpukinskis 4y ago
  If I put on my rose colored glasses, I still wish Facebook had just stuck to identity. They could’ve been “the login for the social internet”… they even built that platform! They just were so paranoid about losing control of the graph they shut it all down. Twitter also failed on the developer/platform front for the same reason. They could’ve been the identity platform for every hot startup in the last 10 years. They could’ve courted developers such that every platform add-on they did got immediate head start… like ads! They could’ve out-AdSensed Adsense. Anyway, I’m sure that’s all terrible business strategy, but it’s what I wish they had done. Even though I’d probably be cursing their name now if they owned all of our logins.
- bergenty 4y ago
  Screw that, I think the meta verse will pan out. Zucc will rise from the ashes.
- andromeduck 4y ago
  They should have never given up on mobile. Burning a few billion a year on an android fork would have had much better returns than trying to go warp speed on VR.
matwood 4y ago
> meltdowns Huh?. Meta's growth has slowed, but they are a money printing machine. Earnings have gone down because of the enormous bet Zuck has made on the metaverse. Twitter has been barely scraping by for years. The two companies are not really even comparable.
- jryhjythtr 4y ago
  Their income and operating margin has almost halved, compared to 2021. Their free cash flow is 1/50th of the previous few quarters. Those are truly horrible results. FB was a money printing machine, but they trashed it.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    Apple trashed it, not FB itself.
    - jryhjythtr 4y ago
      FB started sinking money into the Metaverse long before that.
      - matwood 4y ago
        Not at the same scale. It's been accelerating and continues to accelerate. From another announcement today: > "We continue to anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year," https://www.marketwatch.com/story/meta-lowers-expense-forecast-for-next-year-as-it-announces-broad-layoffs-2022-11-09 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/meta-lowers-expense-foreca... Everyone wants to dance on Meta's grave, but it's way too soon. Yes, the Apple change gave them a top line haircut, but if the RL spend is excluded, they are making a ton of money. I'd also argue that the real headwinds are the general economy and TikTok.
        jryhjythtr 4y ago
        >the real headwinds are the general economy and TikTok Right, and not Apple's actions.
PM_me_your_math 4y ago
Correct me if I am worng, but hasnt Twitter has seen more growth in the last week than it has in some time? 15 million new users isn't a meltdown, nor is thinning a bloated and wasteful enterprise. Also, if twitter goes completely belly up, Musk would still be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Grave? I'm game for some hyperbole, but not this early.
- fleddr 4y ago
  You being downvoted just shows even this community prefers emotional projections over simple facts. There is no Twitter meltdown. Before Musk it was already in grave financial trouble and would have made 800m$ cuts anyway. Musk most certainly is clumsy in his actions and communications, but Twitter isn't going anywhere. Likewise, Facebook isn't having a meltdown either. There's a dent in ad spent against a backdrop of 2 years of dramatic overhiring (same as Google, Stripe). There's a 4% decline in revenue on a 27 billion quarterly revenue. Meltdown? There's a handful of companies on this planet being this profitable.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Financially twitter is in a rough spot. They were not really making money. Now they have loans to pay too. It isn't in meltdown but certainly there are things to look at there. Sure, Elon can keep it going for as long as he'd like. But he's a fickle personality. I mean he went back and forth several times just with buying the company. Who knows if he'll lose interest.
    - fleddr 4y ago
      You're right, but Twitter basically has been in continuous financial trouble since eternity. In 2016 they almost went bankrupt. They tried to sell then but nobody wanted it. Just before Musk they were also in financial catastrophe mode. Under Musk, that will likely continue for at least a year. It's a fundamentally unhealthy businesses. I'd like to use a common Dutch expression to explain the Twitter situation: "the soup isn't eaten as hot as it is served". Musk wants absolute free speech but that's just a random interview quote, not the actual plan for Twitter. Users are abandoning the service in droves. No, they are not. A handful of advertisers stop spending (conveniently part of an economic downturn) but that doesn't mean the vast majority do, or do so indefinitely. Twitter is an awful place now, whilst he hasn't implemented a single change yet. Checkmarks will get decimated whilst his original unhinged idea is already dialed back. Everybody's jumping on all kinds of hysterical projections that are not supported by the facts. There is no meltdown.
roflyear 4y ago
FB is making like $30bn year in profit. I am not sure if they are melting down?
paxys 4y ago
Zuck is doing first ever mass layoffs for a company he started from his dorm room 18 years ago and grew to a ~trillion dollar valuation. Musk is following the standard playbook of private equity takeover + gutting the company to squeeze out remaining profits and then sell for parts. There is no question of even a bit of emotion involved from his side.

lvl102 4y ago

Zuck did it himself too. No one told him to go all-in on VR. No one. All he had to do was tackle payment and maybe cloud. He first went for crypto and then is in the process of failing with VR. Meta really needs to be in the cloud business.

pavlov 4y ago
FB briefly was in the cloud PaaS business when they acquired Parse. The problem is that the way Meta runs its data centers and software stack is tightly integrated with the products. It’s not really amenable to running third party applications or storing third party data.
- oblio 4y ago
  Nobody's infra business is really neatly separated. If the will is there, it can be done.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  So, loosen the connection? Isn't that what thousands of engineers are for? Didn't Amazon do this originally? I'm not sure cloud is actually such a great thing for FB but if you're going to do it, that's an inevitable step, isn't it?
- scarface74 4y ago
  Amazon’s infrastructure was also tightly integrated with its products. Despite the often repeated and very wrong myth that AWS was founded by Amazon selling its “excess capacity”, AWS was always created with a separate infrastructure that was purpose built to sell to other companies: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-how-amazon-s-web-service-started-just-won-t-die.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
- mbreese 4y ago
  What about the concept of a data center inside a data center? Given their infrastructure size and necessary geographical layout, it should be possible to have a number of IaaS racks stored inside their existing data center footprint. If they have their own data centers (which I assume they do), this would make a lot of sense, kinda like a ghost kitchen — a virtual data center. That is, assuming they have the physical space to support something like this. It would be a way to diversify income with largely existing resources and vendor contracts. Imagine even a slimmed down service like fly.io or Cloudflare workers running at FB data center scale.
  - spydum 4y ago
    not a ton of market for that. and it changes the risk nature of their own facilities. already plenty of hyperscale datacenters with space to lease. what advantage does meta offer? surely they wont beat on price.
    - mbreese 4y ago
      It’s probably not worth the hassle to FB, but it is funny to think about how big of a business this could potentially be. But even a profitable business unit might not make enough profit to actually make it worthwhile. It could certainly work. But it would probably be too small a business for a company as large as Meta. The differences in scales is (I think) one of their problems. At Meta scale (somewhat a pun), many things are just harder/not worthwhile because of their size.
whatyesaid 4y ago
How would Meta win in the cloud business though?
- lvl102 4y ago
  My opinion is that Meta has the best AI/ML infra in the business.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    Both TikTok and Google (Tensorflow etc) would beg to differ on that.
- XorNot 4y ago
  They don't need to win, they just need to be there as another option. Every business I've worked at has been huge on wanting cloud diversity of some sort, and tons of startups act as middle men on this. Another of the big boys offering a cloud product would guarantee it would pick up customers and give them another avenue they can plausibly hunt for competitive advantage in.
- reilly3000 4y ago
  SMB. They are effectively the webmaster for a vast amount of very small business, but also Meta's ad platform ends up being one of the larger expenses for many businesses. In fact, I doubt there is a single entity on earth that has more billable B2B relationships. I agree that spinning up a pure-play public cloud makes no sense for Meta. Its not in their ethos, moreover selling various abstractions over virtualized compute is a commodity. Why would they get in line, behind IBM and Oracle? Given that Office 365 is being counted as 'Cloud' imagine what Meta could do with some $100/yr SMB service. On the enterprise end, they have some of the very best big data and ML infra and could do well to bundle up extra capacity sell that on a metered basis. If they had started offering managed Presto in 2015 this conversation wouldn't be happening. Their network infra (IP space, undersea cables, edge pops etc) is also rather vast and I could see a lot of SMB to F500 customers lining up to leverage it if bundled right. If they wanted to they could write a check for CloudFlare, I checked their balance sheet. Meta Cloudflare would be a juggernaut; so powerful that I pray the FTC wouldn't allow it. Historically Facebook has been allergic to B2B outside of selling ads. Even within it they bought and killed Atlas, effectively handing a monopoly on ad serving to Doubleclick. Now they are warming up to it, offering Workplace, Kustomer, and Oculus for enterprise. I think that the Metaverse could be a novel B2B play and so do they, calling it "The Future of Work". tl;dr: Meta could win the cloud business because it has the people, cash, differentiated tech, and existing relationships. They could beat AWS/GCP/Azure in many segments of IT spend by packaging their assets together into a novel kind of cloud.
danpalmer 4y ago
Agree on VR, payments, disagree on Cloud. It's a saturated market, there are half a dozen operators who each have unique selling points. I don't know what Meta's would be. Doubling down on becoming one of these "everything" apps could have been a good strategy. Become the app frontend for one of the less big food delivery companies in the FB app, tie in to payments. Perhaps even buy Square for Cash App and all the POS integrations to build a network of sellers, all tightly integrated from the consumer perspective into the Facebook app. I'd have hated it, but I suspect it could have worked.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  It would have cratered their gross margins though, which would have meant a (potentially permanent) hit to the share price. I agree that it would have been a good strategy, but that's (presumably) why they never did it.
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    Interesting. Is that because payments are much lower margin than ads? Surely investors would be smart enough to see the additional revenue, and likely additional benefit to the ads business, as being worth it?
    - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      Investors like standardized numbers apparently
  - lvl102 4y ago
    Payment has much higher multiple especially compared to FB. It’s quite literally the closest thing to printing money.
    - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      It doesn't have the same margins as advertising.
personjerry 4y ago
You have to make big bets to continue winning. It's easy for us to sit in our armchairs and criticize their failures, but for example their plays with going mobile-first in 2008 and the acquisition of Instagram in 2012 worked out very well.
- boxed 4y ago
  It's better to make many small bets and when they start to take off, THEN put the foot on the pedal. Zuck has been notoriously bad at creating new products, so betting the company on that he'll manage it this time seems like a very bad idea.
  - benjaminwootton 4y ago
    Buying Instagram was a real jaw dropping moment if I remember. $1 billion sounded like a lot of money back in the day!
  - sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
    How do you start a Tesla with small bets?
    - boxed 4y ago
      With the roadster. He also started SpaceX with Falcon 1, not Falcon 9, and certainly not Starship.
      - sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
        That's a good point. The principle of proving a simple possible version makes sense. Just pointing out that those "small" steps Tesla took are already a lot bigger than most software projects.
        boxed 4y ago
        Mostly because those projects are badly mismanaged from before they even write the first line of code :P
Moldoteck 4y ago
I thought this problem is less related to vr and more related to ads revenue that dropped because of apple. vr was just a way to create a platform from the ground where ads will continue to be their business model
cdiddy2 4y ago
Their payment attempt was stifled by regulators though. I wonder where they would be at if they had launched Diem instead of shutting that down
tech_tuna 4y ago
I'm not looking to praise Zuck but he did at least try something new. That's how companies stay alive and vital and relevant. Innovation. He gambled big on VR and it didn't pay off. At least not yet. I don't think it will pay off but I have to respect that he went big on a new direction for the company. I still think Facebook is evil and I feel like they should have tried to buy Tik Tok although I don't know how feasible that ever was. >Meta really needs to be in the cloud business. That's an interesting idea.
- optymizer 4y ago
  TikTok is a Chinese company bringing in mountains of data on US citizens, including the ability to influence what people in the US see on a daily basis. The Chinese government would never sell that kind of leverage to anyone, let alone to Facebook, which is banned in China.
  - system2 4y ago
    It is baffling why the U.S. government didn't ban TikTok. I'd rather zucc steal people's info than chinese ppl.
    - triyambakam 4y ago
      Because some and certain high ranking US officials are working with China
      - LastTrain 4y ago
        Who?
        triyambakam 4y ago
        I don't know who, maybe Trump? Biden? But it wouldn't be allowed if some weren't allowing it.
zulban 4y ago
> No one told him to go all-in on VR. No one. You can't possibly know that. Try not to get caught up in your own speculation and speculation from pundits.
rippercushions 4y ago
AWS has the first mover advantage, Microsoft knows enterprise, Google has some awesome tech. I'm not sure what Meta could bring to the table?
- randomsearch 4y ago
  100%. I do think there is room for another company though... but definitely not Facebook.
  - eitally 4y ago
    But there are other companies, who are already doing pretty well: Oracle, Alibaba/AliCloud, Hetzer, Digital Ocean, even Rackspace.
erikpukinskis 4y ago
If I put on my rose colored glasses, I still wish Facebook had just stuck to identity. They could’ve been “the login for the social internet”… they even built that platform! They just were so paranoid about losing control of the graph they shut it all down. Twitter also failed on the developer/platform front for the same reason. They could’ve been the identity platform for every hot startup in the last 10 years. They could’ve courted developers such that every platform add-on they did got immediate head start… like ads! They could’ve out-AdSensed Adsense. Anyway, I’m sure that’s all terrible business strategy, but it’s what I wish they had done. Even though I’d probably be cursing their name now if they owned all of our logins.
bergenty 4y ago
Screw that, I think the meta verse will pan out. Zucc will rise from the ashes.
andromeduck 4y ago
They should have never given up on mobile. Burning a few billion a year on an android fork would have had much better returns than trying to go warp speed on VR.

matwood 4y ago

> meltdowns Huh?. Meta's growth has slowed, but they are a money printing machine. Earnings have gone down because of the enormous bet Zuck has made on the metaverse. Twitter has been barely scraping by for years. The two companies are not really even comparable.

jryhjythtr 4y ago
Their income and operating margin has almost halved, compared to 2021. Their free cash flow is 1/50th of the previous few quarters. Those are truly horrible results. FB was a money printing machine, but they trashed it.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Apple trashed it, not FB itself.
  - jryhjythtr 4y ago
    FB started sinking money into the Metaverse long before that.
    - matwood 4y ago
      Not at the same scale. It's been accelerating and continues to accelerate. From another announcement today: > "We continue to anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year," https://www.marketwatch.com/story/meta-lowers-expense-forecast-for-next-year-as-it-announces-broad-layoffs-2022-11-09 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/meta-lowers-expense-foreca... Everyone wants to dance on Meta's grave, but it's way too soon. Yes, the Apple change gave them a top line haircut, but if the RL spend is excluded, they are making a ton of money. I'd also argue that the real headwinds are the general economy and TikTok.
      - jryhjythtr 4y ago
        >the real headwinds are the general economy and TikTok Right, and not Apple's actions.

PM_me_your_math 4y ago

Correct me if I am worng, but hasnt Twitter has seen more growth in the last week than it has in some time? 15 million new users isn't a meltdown, nor is thinning a bloated and wasteful enterprise. Also, if twitter goes completely belly up, Musk would still be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Grave? I'm game for some hyperbole, but not this early.

fleddr 4y ago
You being downvoted just shows even this community prefers emotional projections over simple facts. There is no Twitter meltdown. Before Musk it was already in grave financial trouble and would have made 800m$ cuts anyway. Musk most certainly is clumsy in his actions and communications, but Twitter isn't going anywhere. Likewise, Facebook isn't having a meltdown either. There's a dent in ad spent against a backdrop of 2 years of dramatic overhiring (same as Google, Stripe). There's a 4% decline in revenue on a 27 billion quarterly revenue. Meltdown? There's a handful of companies on this planet being this profitable.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Financially twitter is in a rough spot. They were not really making money. Now they have loans to pay too. It isn't in meltdown but certainly there are things to look at there. Sure, Elon can keep it going for as long as he'd like. But he's a fickle personality. I mean he went back and forth several times just with buying the company. Who knows if he'll lose interest.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    You're right, but Twitter basically has been in continuous financial trouble since eternity. In 2016 they almost went bankrupt. They tried to sell then but nobody wanted it. Just before Musk they were also in financial catastrophe mode. Under Musk, that will likely continue for at least a year. It's a fundamentally unhealthy businesses. I'd like to use a common Dutch expression to explain the Twitter situation: "the soup isn't eaten as hot as it is served". Musk wants absolute free speech but that's just a random interview quote, not the actual plan for Twitter. Users are abandoning the service in droves. No, they are not. A handful of advertisers stop spending (conveniently part of an economic downturn) but that doesn't mean the vast majority do, or do so indefinitely. Twitter is an awful place now, whilst he hasn't implemented a single change yet. Checkmarks will get decimated whilst his original unhinged idea is already dialed back. Everybody's jumping on all kinds of hysterical projections that are not supported by the facts. There is no meltdown.

roflyear 4y ago

FB is making like $30bn year in profit. I am not sure if they are melting down?

paxys 4y ago

Zuck is doing first ever mass layoffs for a company he started from his dorm room 18 years ago and grew to a ~trillion dollar valuation. Musk is following the standard playbook of private equity takeover + gutting the company to squeeze out remaining profits and then sell for parts. There is no question of even a bit of emotion involved from his side.