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I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for. Let's say Elon had set asid

I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for. Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model. So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too. You're correct that he wouldn't have the existing Twitter user base, but if he built a better product that is more modern and cut out some of the dead-weight features, wouldn't this option still be significantly cheaper than acquiring a company for $44 billion who only deals in software? At least apple makes products, as does amazon and at least amazon is a distribution behemoth. I struggle to see the 44 billion in value for what appears to be a relatively mundane application. In my mind I don't see anyone even spending on the order of 1 billion to build a better Twitter from scratch.

misiti3780 4y ago
All of the people (or most of the people) that matter would not have left Twitter for Elon's new company. Tons of people have tried this. Remember Dalton Caldwell's App.net. That didn't even get off the ground and it had a ton of YC press. Network affects are real.
- autospeaker22 4y ago
  I think for an insane comp and equity in a new company led by Elon, lots of people would consider leaving. Network affects are real and is probably a top 10 world individual as far as the power of his network is concerned. Having a ton of YC press is way different than being Elon. Even still he could pay people to use his application. Pay businesses $20 a month for a verified business account. Pay individual users $10-100 a month based on activity and engagement. Does it scale? Absolutely not but I still think it'd end up cheaper than $44 billion.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    Go check out Mixer and Facebook's game streaming if you want to see how well buying influencers onto your platform works. It doesn't. No one's ever made it work. You need users and creators and users are considerably more stubborn than creators.
    - autospeaker22 4y ago
      Guess it's like Zuck trying to force everyone onto the Metaverse.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  Top comment on app.net shutdown notice on HN ( Jan2017): > "So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twitterholic, Donald Trump came and bludgeoned everyone with his bombastic prose, and now App.net is shutting down. And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723
  - misiti3780 4y ago
    are you agreeing or disagreeing with me?
- kondro 4y ago
  You're right. But how much marketing can $44B and time buy you to replicate these network effects? There are plenty of people trying to replicate the success of the existing social networks, but they're all doing it for $10's - $100's millions. How much traction would you get if you paid the top 5,000 Twitter accounts $5 million to post exclusively on your new social network?
throwuwu 4y ago
The problem with your proposal is that Elons Twitter followers do not equal a profitable market. He needs Twitter’s brand and established user base to bootstrap whatever X is (something payment related probably). If it were just a bunch of his fans it wouldn’t have the penetration needed to loop more people in.
- autospeaker22 4y ago
  I'd argue his followers are his greatest chance at profit. Many people despise him and have been closing their twitter accounts. So despite it still being twitter brand and established users, they don't like Elon so they don't want to support the platform.
  - bb88 4y ago
    So let's say we're being generous and say Elon has 10M hardcore followers. So $44B/10M = $4.4k per follower on Twitter. If he can sell each of those a Tesla it might be fine. I'm beginning to hear the term "Muskmobile" bandied about in not a good way though. Consumer Reports is reporting a ton of reliability problems as Tesla scales up [1]. And Ford/GM is not far behind in their electric offerings either. [1] https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Tesla-ranks-almost-dead-last-Consumer-Reports-16632996.php#:~:text=Among%20the%20concerns%20Consumer%20Reports,a%205%20out%20of%20100 https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Tesla-ranks-almost-dead-....
  - Consultant32452 4y ago
    Elon reported on Nov 7 that Twitter usage was at an all time high. Do you believe that is dishonest? Or do you believe this uptick will be short-lived?
    - nickcotter 4y ago
      I’d be surprised if usage didn’t spike with the elections going on.
awinder 4y ago
Congratulations, you just lost all your invested capital on Truth Social 2.0.
- autospeaker22 4y ago
  Better in theory than IRL. You think the Don was able to get top dev talent lol?
  - nightski 4y ago
    Top dev talent is overrated imo. Not to mention almost every dev thinks they are top tier even if most of us are just mediocre.
    - autospeaker22 4y ago
      I guess there's that.. but at a rate of 2 million a year, if someone was under-performing I'd imagine Elon would quickly be able to cycle in and out. And if the whole thing fails after 1-2 years, it's still not even half a billion spent. Compared to the titanic Twitter sinking.
    - robocat 4y ago
      > Top dev talent is overrated The problem is that talent is defined by hindsight: “When the company was acquired by Facebook, it had 35 engineers” https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us... Let us start with engineering team A and and an equally talented engineering team B. If team B had the luck to work on a successful product due to a successful market, we call them talented. If A flamed out due to unpredictable reasons (that their market turned out to be shit), we lambast the lack of ability of team A. But technical talent is definitely not overrated - because there are too many examples where talented teams have built unicorn multi-billion $ businesses.
  - fredley 4y ago
    I don't think you even need top dev talent to build Twitter now. Maybe you did back when it started, but it's not something a team of experienced, competent, 'regular' engineers couldn't build and more successfully than 'top' talent.
thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for. It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thousands of people are paying the price. We'll probably never know, but I'd love to hear the story of how exactly he thought it would be a good idea to blindly sign the binding paperwork for the purchase without doing any serious due diligence. Either his lawyers were begging him not to or they're as dumb as he is.
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  I think he did want to buy since the beginning. He's got bigger plans for it beyond short messages. The free speech thing is just marketing.
  - anonyme-honteux 4y ago
    My cynical guess: Elon Musk's big plan is simply to build a huge personality cult around him and Twitter is perfect for that. It's not enough for him to be exceptionally rich, he wants to be adulated. He wants to hear he is the new Steve Jobs, that he is better than Leonardo Da Vinci. That he got this right, we are living in a computer simulation. Why do everyone keeps assuming he is playing 10 dimensional chess? Have you seen his dumb tunnel under Las Vegas? Why would a brilliant engineer build that? What's the big plan here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NiM_p8n5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NiM_p8n5A
    - thot_experiment 4y ago
      I mean, I don't think the dumb tunnel under vegas is good evidence of not being a brilliant engineer. He obviously has a very deep understanding of engineering type shit as well as engineering management[0][1]. He's got engineer brain! Engineer brain can make you do a lot of really stupid shit even if you're a great engineer. That being said I absolutely don't think he's playing 10D chess, he's got a few big Ws and it's gone to his head in a disastrous way. He can be a brilliant engineer/engineering manager and a total fucking idiot at the same time. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAtLTLiqNwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAtLTLiqNwg [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
shp0ngle 4y ago
He doesn’t want to build a better twitter. He wants to _own this twitter_.
- lesuorac 4y ago
  I wonder if he'll get himself retroactive added as a founder of twitter in the past just like tesla.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  "You made this? I made this." https://imgflip.com/i/70bgz4 https://imgflip.com/i/70bgz4
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
> And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model. No, you won't. There's a lot more to running a social media site than just building it. You can't just build and ship. Either it is a paid service, or it runs on ads. For the former, good luck amassing any substantial amount of users. For the latter, well, evidence shows that brand security is important and advertisers don't want their brands displayed along the endless stream of n-words, racism, and homophobia enabled by free-speech absolutionists like Elon. So with such a cesspool, why would anyone in their right mind join? Without users, you can not run an ad-based social network either. Now that I covered the bare minimum; this is a great read on why you can't just build and ship, if it was easy, twitter wouldn't have been unprofitable for years, and all other twitter clones with free speech wouldn't have failed. https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
- autospeaker22 4y ago
  Alright. Even if you double it to 40 million to hire the elite tier dev team, ops, and sre. They could definitely build, ship, and maintain. Yes, he'd be losing money at 40 million a year just on salaries, but I'd imagine they could build something pretty amazing at that rate. Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them. How is his current reality any better than starting fresh. He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples.
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    > Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them. Either Elon is delusional, or he is posturing. Either way, he is in no position to demand anything [1,2]. In [1], Elon was told by industry leaders what the issues with his approach are, and then Elon blocked one of them. Elon claims that activists are pushing advertisers but according to industry leaders, that is not true [1]. > Elon, Great chat yesterday, As you heard overwhelmingly from senior advertisers on the call, the issue concerning us all is content moderation and its impact on BRAND SAFETY/SUITABILITY. You say you’re committed to moderation, but you just laid off 75% of the moderation team! > Advertisers are not being manipulated by activist groups, they are being compelled by established principles around the types of companies they can do business with. These principles include an assessment of the platforms commitment to brand safety and suitability. So really; free-speech absolution does not work. Read the post I linked to. > He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples. Probably no. Read the post in the comment above. Handling hatespeech from an operational perspective is one thing, and from a technical perspective e.g. identifying and categorizing it is a whole different thing. Elon has already gone back to his free-speech absolutionism [3]. His tweets: > Twitter will not allow anyone who was de-platformed for violating Twitter rules back on platform until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks > Talked to civil society leaders @JGreenblattADL , @YaelEisenstat , @rashadrobinson , @JGo4Justice , @normanlschen , @DerrickNAACP , @TheBushCenter Ken Hersch & @SindyBenavides about how Twitter will continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies As for this one: > How is his current reality any better than starting fresh. He has users, for now. This means that he doesn't need to spend money on growth. [1] https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-gets-pilloried-by-top-ad-exec-over-rift-with-sponsors-hes-petulant-and-thoughtless/ https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-gets-pilloried-by-to... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/musk-twitter-brands-interview/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/musk-twitter-brands-... [3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/right-wingers-turning-elon-musk-moderation-1234623259/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/right-wi...
jensvdh 4y ago
If you paid me anywhere between 750-1.5M a year just go on in the office 40 hours a week I'd take that offer any day every day. I did the same for less than half of that not even 2 years ago. The problem with Musk companies is 1) It'll be MINIMUM 40 hours a week, no WLB 2) His companies aren't known for paying competitively
- autospeaker22 4y ago
  Didn't know that about the comp at his companies. Kind of crazy considering the risk to human life associated with many of his companies. Would've expected them to pay top tier.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    Then you would be shocked to learn how little software engineers are paid in the automotive industry vs me working on dumb VC money pit web apps.
- VirusNewbie 4y ago
  Didn’t need to be too competitive when you had 11x stock growth. Will be interesting to see if things change now that their stock is flatish.
ur-whale 4y ago
> I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for. Two things to counter that idea: 1. Social apps aren't about features, they're about the network effect and the user base. Rebuilding that of Twitter at this stage would have been very hard. 2. Even assuming that was possible, the time it would take to rebuild something like it means guaranteed failure.
eftychis 4y ago
He bought the users not the equipment, developers etc. The brand and domain is what he bought -- in his mind at least.
throw8383833jj 4y ago
Anybody can build a twitter at a tiny fraction of the cost of Twitter. The problem is always user acquisition. It's extraodinarily difficult to get a vast segment of the userbase to switch to your platform. Even getting a tiny handful would cost vast sums of money. Think about it. If it could be done, it would be done and we'd see a largely segmented social media landscape with hundreds of twitter clones. It's not the case.
- fortydegrees 4y ago
  Twitter has 450M monthly active users. Elon bought it for $44bn. With ~$5bn in operating expenses, that gives you an absolutely insane CAC of $90 to play with.
  - throw8383833jj 4y ago
    Yup! That gives you an idea of roughly how much it costs to acquire customers and Keep them!
- autospeaker22 4y ago
  Makes sense.. there's a small handful of social media platforms people actually use compared to cemetery of failed attempts.
- gray_-_wolf 4y ago
  Isn't one exception to this the case when you control both the old and new platform, and can technically just migrate what content possible and just replace the old one with new? It technically does not even have to be "new" platform, it could be presented as "twitter redesign".
- selectout 4y ago
  I'm always curious if he just set aside say $250k/year (2 year contract maybe?) to the top 100 content creators at Twitter/IG/TikTok today. Add $25 million to the annual costs and have the chicken/egg problem semi-saved.
siquick 4y ago
This is a pretty naive take on how hard it is to build a application that relies on any kind of network effect, activation, and retention, not to mention a complex ad platform that needs CS/Sales to even get it off the ground.
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dools 4y ago
It would be even cheaper to just buy the political influence he is trying to wield by directly funding politicians like his buddy Peter Thiel. Corrupting the GOP is surprisingly inexpensive for the value you receive in return.
qez 4y ago
> So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too No. He got that number of followers because he is on Twitter. He would not get the same number of followers on some other social media platoform. Trump had 20 times as many followers on Twitter than he has on Truth Social. And those Truth Social users are less valuable. Engineers like to think that the engineering is the important part of platforms. It's not. The engineering can be easily replicated. The valuable part of platforms is the users. You buy the platforms to buy the users.
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TulliusCicero 4y ago
That money would get you a very robust prototype, but getting to scale requires building a lot of random other features that most users aren't aware of, plus being around long enough with half-decent community management to acquire users. Companies like Twitter don't get big for no reason. Yes, there's obviously some bloat, but a lot of it's just random 'non-core' features that still need to get done.
vonseel 4y ago
I’m just guessing, but maybe Elon really loves Twitter. Building a new platform wouldn’t allow him to rescue the thing he loves. Seems more like an emotional decision than a logical one.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
Disagree, a lot. Most people underestimate two things, IMHO. One is obvious: the cost of convincing everyone that Muskitter is the place to go. The second one? You could NOT build a twitter equivalent for a billion dollars. I'd be happy to take bets. Corollary to number two: building it means actually two things: one, building it, and two, having a team that can start from the moment of finished building it, and continue developing and bug fixing and supporting the platform from T+1 onwards.
NewEntryHN 4y ago
> cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter That's cute.

misiti3780 4y ago

All of the people (or most of the people) that matter would not have left Twitter for Elon's new company. Tons of people have tried this. Remember Dalton Caldwell's App.net. That didn't even get off the ground and it had a ton of YC press. Network affects are real.

autospeaker22 4y ago
I think for an insane comp and equity in a new company led by Elon, lots of people would consider leaving. Network affects are real and is probably a top 10 world individual as far as the power of his network is concerned. Having a ton of YC press is way different than being Elon. Even still he could pay people to use his application. Pay businesses $20 a month for a verified business account. Pay individual users $10-100 a month based on activity and engagement. Does it scale? Absolutely not but I still think it'd end up cheaper than $44 billion.
- stormbrew 4y ago
  Go check out Mixer and Facebook's game streaming if you want to see how well buying influencers onto your platform works. It doesn't. No one's ever made it work. You need users and creators and users are considerably more stubborn than creators.
  - autospeaker22 4y ago
    Guess it's like Zuck trying to force everyone onto the Metaverse.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Top comment on app.net shutdown notice on HN ( Jan2017): > "So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twitterholic, Donald Trump came and bludgeoned everyone with his bombastic prose, and now App.net is shutting down. And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723
- misiti3780 4y ago
  are you agreeing or disagreeing with me?
kondro 4y ago
You're right. But how much marketing can $44B and time buy you to replicate these network effects? There are plenty of people trying to replicate the success of the existing social networks, but they're all doing it for $10's - $100's millions. How much traction would you get if you paid the top 5,000 Twitter accounts $5 million to post exclusively on your new social network?

throwuwu 4y ago

The problem with your proposal is that Elons Twitter followers do not equal a profitable market. He needs Twitter’s brand and established user base to bootstrap whatever X is (something payment related probably). If it were just a bunch of his fans it wouldn’t have the penetration needed to loop more people in.

autospeaker22 4y ago
I'd argue his followers are his greatest chance at profit. Many people despise him and have been closing their twitter accounts. So despite it still being twitter brand and established users, they don't like Elon so they don't want to support the platform.
- bb88 4y ago
  So let's say we're being generous and say Elon has 10M hardcore followers. So $44B/10M = $4.4k per follower on Twitter. If he can sell each of those a Tesla it might be fine. I'm beginning to hear the term "Muskmobile" bandied about in not a good way though. Consumer Reports is reporting a ton of reliability problems as Tesla scales up [1]. And Ford/GM is not far behind in their electric offerings either. [1] https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Tesla-ranks-almost-dead-last-Consumer-Reports-16632996.php#:~:text=Among%20the%20concerns%20Consumer%20Reports,a%205%20out%20of%20100 https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Tesla-ranks-almost-dead-....
- Consultant32452 4y ago
  Elon reported on Nov 7 that Twitter usage was at an all time high. Do you believe that is dishonest? Or do you believe this uptick will be short-lived?
  - nickcotter 4y ago
    I’d be surprised if usage didn’t spike with the elections going on.

awinder 4y ago

Congratulations, you just lost all your invested capital on Truth Social 2.0.

autospeaker22 4y ago
Better in theory than IRL. You think the Don was able to get top dev talent lol?
- nightski 4y ago
  Top dev talent is overrated imo. Not to mention almost every dev thinks they are top tier even if most of us are just mediocre.
  - autospeaker22 4y ago
    I guess there's that.. but at a rate of 2 million a year, if someone was under-performing I'd imagine Elon would quickly be able to cycle in and out. And if the whole thing fails after 1-2 years, it's still not even half a billion spent. Compared to the titanic Twitter sinking.
  - robocat 4y ago
    > Top dev talent is overrated The problem is that talent is defined by hindsight: “When the company was acquired by Facebook, it had 35 engineers” https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us... Let us start with engineering team A and and an equally talented engineering team B. If team B had the luck to work on a successful product due to a successful market, we call them talented. If A flamed out due to unpredictable reasons (that their market turned out to be shit), we lambast the lack of ability of team A. But technical talent is definitely not overrated - because there are too many examples where talented teams have built unicorn multi-billion $ businesses.
- fredley 4y ago
  I don't think you even need top dev talent to build Twitter now. Maybe you did back when it started, but it's not something a team of experienced, competent, 'regular' engineers couldn't build and more successfully than 'top' talent.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago

> I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for. It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thousands of people are paying the price. We'll probably never know, but I'd love to hear the story of how exactly he thought it would be a good idea to blindly sign the binding paperwork for the purchase without doing any serious due diligence. Either his lawyers were begging him not to or they're as dumb as he is.

rmbyrro 4y ago
I think he did want to buy since the beginning. He's got bigger plans for it beyond short messages. The free speech thing is just marketing.
- anonyme-honteux 4y ago
  My cynical guess: Elon Musk's big plan is simply to build a huge personality cult around him and Twitter is perfect for that. It's not enough for him to be exceptionally rich, he wants to be adulated. He wants to hear he is the new Steve Jobs, that he is better than Leonardo Da Vinci. That he got this right, we are living in a computer simulation. Why do everyone keeps assuming he is playing 10 dimensional chess? Have you seen his dumb tunnel under Las Vegas? Why would a brilliant engineer build that? What's the big plan here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NiM_p8n5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NiM_p8n5A
  - thot_experiment 4y ago
    I mean, I don't think the dumb tunnel under vegas is good evidence of not being a brilliant engineer. He obviously has a very deep understanding of engineering type shit as well as engineering management[0][1]. He's got engineer brain! Engineer brain can make you do a lot of really stupid shit even if you're a great engineer. That being said I absolutely don't think he's playing 10D chess, he's got a few big Ws and it's gone to his head in a disastrous way. He can be a brilliant engineer/engineering manager and a total fucking idiot at the same time. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAtLTLiqNwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAtLTLiqNwg [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw

shp0ngle 4y ago

He doesn’t want to build a better twitter. He wants to _own this twitter_.

lesuorac 4y ago
I wonder if he'll get himself retroactive added as a founder of twitter in the past just like tesla.
jonny_eh 4y ago
"You made this? I made this." https://imgflip.com/i/70bgz4 https://imgflip.com/i/70bgz4

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

> And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model. No, you won't. There's a lot more to running a social media site than just building it. You can't just build and ship. Either it is a paid service, or it runs on ads. For the former, good luck amassing any substantial amount of users. For the latter, well, evidence shows that brand security is important and advertisers don't want their brands displayed along the endless stream of n-words, racism, and homophobia enabled by free-speech absolutionists like Elon. So with such a cesspool, why would anyone in their right mind join? Without users, you can not run an ad-based social network either. Now that I covered the bare minimum; this is a great read on why you can't just build and ship, if it was easy, twitter wouldn't have been unprofitable for years, and all other twitter clones with free speech wouldn't have failed. https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

autospeaker22 4y ago
Alright. Even if you double it to 40 million to hire the elite tier dev team, ops, and sre. They could definitely build, ship, and maintain. Yes, he'd be losing money at 40 million a year just on salaries, but I'd imagine they could build something pretty amazing at that rate. Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them. How is his current reality any better than starting fresh. He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  > Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them. Either Elon is delusional, or he is posturing. Either way, he is in no position to demand anything [1,2]. In [1], Elon was told by industry leaders what the issues with his approach are, and then Elon blocked one of them. Elon claims that activists are pushing advertisers but according to industry leaders, that is not true [1]. > Elon, Great chat yesterday, As you heard overwhelmingly from senior advertisers on the call, the issue concerning us all is content moderation and its impact on BRAND SAFETY/SUITABILITY. You say you’re committed to moderation, but you just laid off 75% of the moderation team! > Advertisers are not being manipulated by activist groups, they are being compelled by established principles around the types of companies they can do business with. These principles include an assessment of the platforms commitment to brand safety and suitability. So really; free-speech absolution does not work. Read the post I linked to. > He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples. Probably no. Read the post in the comment above. Handling hatespeech from an operational perspective is one thing, and from a technical perspective e.g. identifying and categorizing it is a whole different thing. Elon has already gone back to his free-speech absolutionism [3]. His tweets: > Twitter will not allow anyone who was de-platformed for violating Twitter rules back on platform until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks > Talked to civil society leaders @JGreenblattADL , @YaelEisenstat , @rashadrobinson , @JGo4Justice , @normanlschen , @DerrickNAACP , @TheBushCenter Ken Hersch & @SindyBenavides about how Twitter will continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies As for this one: > How is his current reality any better than starting fresh. He has users, for now. This means that he doesn't need to spend money on growth. [1] https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-gets-pilloried-by-top-ad-exec-over-rift-with-sponsors-hes-petulant-and-thoughtless/ https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-gets-pilloried-by-to... [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/musk-twitter-brands-interview/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/musk-twitter-brands-... [3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/right-wingers-turning-elon-musk-moderation-1234623259/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/right-wi...

jensvdh 4y ago

If you paid me anywhere between 750-1.5M a year just go on in the office 40 hours a week I'd take that offer any day every day. I did the same for less than half of that not even 2 years ago. The problem with Musk companies is 1) It'll be MINIMUM 40 hours a week, no WLB 2) His companies aren't known for paying competitively

autospeaker22 4y ago
Didn't know that about the comp at his companies. Kind of crazy considering the risk to human life associated with many of his companies. Would've expected them to pay top tier.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  Then you would be shocked to learn how little software engineers are paid in the automotive industry vs me working on dumb VC money pit web apps.
VirusNewbie 4y ago
Didn’t need to be too competitive when you had 11x stock growth. Will be interesting to see if things change now that their stock is flatish.

ur-whale 4y ago

> I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for. Two things to counter that idea: 1. Social apps aren't about features, they're about the network effect and the user base. Rebuilding that of Twitter at this stage would have been very hard. 2. Even assuming that was possible, the time it would take to rebuild something like it means guaranteed failure.

eftychis 4y ago

He bought the users not the equipment, developers etc. The brand and domain is what he bought -- in his mind at least.

throw8383833jj 4y ago

Anybody can build a twitter at a tiny fraction of the cost of Twitter. The problem is always user acquisition. It's extraodinarily difficult to get a vast segment of the userbase to switch to your platform. Even getting a tiny handful would cost vast sums of money. Think about it. If it could be done, it would be done and we'd see a largely segmented social media landscape with hundreds of twitter clones. It's not the case.

fortydegrees 4y ago
Twitter has 450M monthly active users. Elon bought it for $44bn. With ~$5bn in operating expenses, that gives you an absolutely insane CAC of $90 to play with.
- throw8383833jj 4y ago
  Yup! That gives you an idea of roughly how much it costs to acquire customers and Keep them!
autospeaker22 4y ago
Makes sense.. there's a small handful of social media platforms people actually use compared to cemetery of failed attempts.
gray_-_wolf 4y ago
Isn't one exception to this the case when you control both the old and new platform, and can technically just migrate what content possible and just replace the old one with new? It technically does not even have to be "new" platform, it could be presented as "twitter redesign".
selectout 4y ago
I'm always curious if he just set aside say $250k/year (2 year contract maybe?) to the top 100 content creators at Twitter/IG/TikTok today. Add $25 million to the annual costs and have the chicken/egg problem semi-saved.

siquick 4y ago

This is a pretty naive take on how hard it is to build a application that relies on any kind of network effect, activation, and retention, not to mention a complex ad platform that needs CS/Sales to even get it off the ground.

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dools 4y ago

It would be even cheaper to just buy the political influence he is trying to wield by directly funding politicians like his buddy Peter Thiel. Corrupting the GOP is surprisingly inexpensive for the value you receive in return.

qez 4y ago

> So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too No. He got that number of followers because he is on Twitter. He would not get the same number of followers on some other social media platoform. Trump had 20 times as many followers on Twitter than he has on Truth Social. And those Truth Social users are less valuable. Engineers like to think that the engineering is the important part of platforms. It's not. The engineering can be easily replicated. The valuable part of platforms is the users. You buy the platforms to buy the users.

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TulliusCicero 4y ago

That money would get you a very robust prototype, but getting to scale requires building a lot of random other features that most users aren't aware of, plus being around long enough with half-decent community management to acquire users. Companies like Twitter don't get big for no reason. Yes, there's obviously some bloat, but a lot of it's just random 'non-core' features that still need to get done.

vonseel 4y ago

I’m just guessing, but maybe Elon really loves Twitter. Building a new platform wouldn’t allow him to rescue the thing he loves. Seems more like an emotional decision than a logical one.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

Disagree, a lot. Most people underestimate two things, IMHO. One is obvious: the cost of convincing everyone that Muskitter is the place to go. The second one? You could NOT build a twitter equivalent for a billion dollars. I'd be happy to take bets. Corollary to number two: building it means actually two things: one, building it, and two, having a team that can start from the moment of finished building it, and continue developing and bug fixing and supporting the platform from T+1 onwards.

NewEntryHN 4y ago

> cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter That's cute.