6 ms·

When Twitter fails there will be no one to blame but Elon. Even so he will still have people like you defending him.

philliphaydon 4y ago
I'm not quite sure how I'm defending him. I don't really like him, especially after he voiced his opinions on Ukraine and Taiwan, I hope he loses all his money. And I'll never touch a Tesla. All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.
- echelon 4y ago
  I was a fan for all that Musk did with SpaceX. Single-handedly dropping costs to LEO and creating a civilian / commercial space industry -- mind blowingly impressive, and willed into existence by one man. When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.
  - d1sxeyes 4y ago
    That “single-handedly” word is where I think the problem begins…
  - cokeandpepsi 4y ago
    The issue here is that he has idiots whispering in his ear this time, the majority of his other ventures he was partnered with decent people it's pretty obvious there's a load of sv vultures egging him on hard to imagine a worse direction for this to go
  - phire 4y ago
    I get the impression that others at SpaceX moderate and "manage" him. Let him get distracted with micro-managing whatever cool project is currently takes his fancy, while they do the more boring job of keeping the company running, and making sure the customers are happy. I bet these people are extra happy when he is focusing on projects that don't have customers yet, like Starship/BFR. Twitter might actually be the first time were he has 100% control over a large company without someone in the background moderating his more wild impulses.
    - bmitc 4y ago
      Does he really do anything at SpaceX?
      - conradfr 4y ago
        He fires people, at least. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1593198409367756800 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1593198409367756800
    - _djo_ 4y ago
      Exactly. Gwynne Shotwell is the too seldom acknowledged hero of SpaceX, who has played exactly that role of keeping the lights on, moderating Musk’s worse impulses, and managing him into less destructive directions. It’s been evident for years. There are similar people at Tesla, who focus on the endless operational tweaking and improvement that Musk finds boring, and who slowly fixed all the most critical issues on the Model 3 line while Musk increasingly took to politics and social media. I’m not one of those who believes Musk hasn’t done anything or played no part in SpaceX or Tesla’s success, because that’s clearly false. But he also hasn’t been the sole genius responsible for all the success or infallible. But too many people have made him believe he was and we’re now seeing the result of that hubris and ignorance.
      - pencilguin 4y ago
        Yet, Gwynne seems happy to lie about suborbital freight for him, and about colonizing Mars. I have not encountered anyone prominent at Tesla supporting his lies about self-driving (though that doesn't mean none do).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kidme5 4y ago
    SpaceX isn't really focused on going to Mars... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33510272#33510919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33510272#33510919
- lazide 4y ago
  99% of companies would have imploded at the same pace. Offending everyone who matters that runs the product you just bought and terrorizing all your employees is a fast and easy road to completely imploding any company.
  - causi 4y ago
    Indeed. I agree with most if not all of the changes Musk made, but it was obvious to anyone that he made them in the worst possible way on the worst possible schedule. He couldn't be doing more damage if he was deliberately trying to tank the company.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    He did that idiocy because company wasn't profitable in the first place tho. Like, yeah, if he did that to well functioning company it would fall apart too, but Twitter wasn't a well-functioning company. And by that I mean "he would ruin it slower".
- BuckRogers 4y ago
  He lost me on Ukraine and Taiwan too. Free democratic societies allowed him to become something. Dictators and Communism for everyone that stands in his way towards more wealth. I was determined to buy a Tesla. Now we placed an order for a VW ID.4.
- concordDance 4y ago
  I really don't get why people dislike his Ukraine stance. "Beat up Russia a bunch, make peace and throw Russia a bone by letting them keep Crimea." seems like the death minimising stance to me and in the best interests of the inhabitants of the each region.
  - tokai 4y ago
    If Russia gets anything out of this war it would be anything but death minimising. It will signal to them, and all other states, that aggressive wars are viable. They are in Ukraine because war has worked out for them in Georgia and Chechnya. You are literally espousing a pro-imperialism stance masquerading as a moderate position.
  - caskstrength 4y ago
    Because it is dumb, insensitive to people losing their lives on the the front lines and makes it seem like Russia is _actually willing_ to get out of Ukraine if only it is allowed to keep Crimea, which it clearly is not?
  - Deukhoofd 4y ago
    Because Russia has been taking pieces of land from Ukraine since 2014. If you'd hand over more land to Russia now, they'd invade again in a couple of years, with their army stronger than it is now. Besides that, appeasement has never worked against aggressors in the past. It basically looks like Musk is calling for another Munich Agreement. It shows a complete lack of understanding of history, and of international relations.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Why would you "throw a bone" to terrorists ? That would be like saying "let's throw a bone to nazis and let them keep Poland"...
    - wussboy 4y ago
      Because appeasement worked out so well!
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. Except that's not true at all. What he did is saddle it with a bunch of debt and fire of a bunch of really-poorly-considered cosr cutting and revenue enhancement ideas that clearly weren’t thought through or part of a coherent strategy. He might have and end-game vision, but he had no plausible roadmap to deal with the sucking wounded he inflcted with the acquisition, much less to get to his end-game vision.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    No sorry. When you have people on Twitter claiming that they should be fixing 10+ years of technical debt to improve performance. And the platform is overrun by bots and spam, issues are not resolved. Complaints dating back 10 years are not addressed in any way. There’s obviously internal problems. If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter. Engineers not being good is probably not the issue. But I’m pretty sure it comes from higher up. It’s also evident that Twitter was poorly managed by the fact it’s pretty much never made a profit.
    - kamaal 4y ago
      >>If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter. It is not just tech debt per se. In larger companies most middle managers have no incentive to fix things for the long term. And lack of automation means they get to hire more people, which is good for them, as it expands their fiefdom. I know one company in California which hires H1-Bs by the thousands, many even make it to Green cards. Their work- Somebody sends a bunch of values from the India office, they manually edit shell scripts(written ages ago, by some dude who has long left), run it, get the values and enter those values into some internal application. The thought that all this could be done by web api's didn't cross their mind. Never mind that automating this simple thing could help cut employee count by the thousands. Another place that I heard of, similar things but with SQL. The whole thing could be automated. But somebody wrote a bunch of shell scripts and left shop. Now people need to take outputs from SQL scripts and feed to the next ones. And then cut paste the data into some system. In the woke world that we live in, where everybody is supposed to be special, and we are supposed to lie to ensure nobody gets hurt feelings. Most people forget, these jobs should have never existed at the first place. Many a times cutting them actually leads to more profits, and saves lots of management effort. Sure people losing jobs is sad, but if you are doing a job that shouldn't exist at the first place, you should likely move before you are let go. The world is full of wasted effort, it is many times even tolerated for all sorts of reasons. But some times it is not.
FormerBandmate 4y ago
Twitter was on pace to lose billions without him. They were doing massive layoffs under Parag, extrapolating Facebook and Snapchat results gets you Twitter’s anemic last reports as a public company even without the overhang of Musk
- rchaud 4y ago
  On pace to lose billions and yet Musk pays $44bn to acquire the company and hand the CEO a 10-figure golden parachute?
  - FormerBandmate 4y ago
    Yeah, why do you think they accepted so quickly? They tried to get Wall Street to be interested and they turned their nose up extremely quickly, and that was right after a 50% price drop
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > and hand the CEO a 10-figure golden parachute? That's two figures more than actual. Reportedly, Musk paid Agrawal $42M and spent $120M total on golden parachutes, which is still only low 9 figures. Still obscene. Most employers do not give severance to fired former employees. They were in charge of Twitter while it was losing billions. They should have paid him. He could have saved money right there by giving them the address to the unemployment office.
    - lazide 4y ago
      He got the Twitter shareholders $44bln dollars for a company that has lost money for Decade. Pretty hard to fire him for cause with that track record, even if the new owners don’t like it. And firing without cause triggers the clause.
mdorazio 4y ago
Twitter was already failing, just in slow motion. 10 out of the last 12 years, including last year, the company lost money. I never saw the management team propose or execute on a legitimate path to sustainable profitability, either. Elon is just driving into the ground faster than the largely incompetent leadership team before him did.
- b112 4y ago
  So what you are saying, is the prior business model did not work, and firing the prior management team, getting rid of complacent employees, and striking out on a new path, is a good idea?
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
latency-guy2 4y ago
Why? The business was weeks away from shutting down in 2015 under original ownership, Twitter looked to be saved from 2018 - 2019, but not really, seeing as 2018-2019 were the only 2 profitable years for Twitter ever Twitter was leaking money for 2020 and 2021, the trend looked to be continuing for 2022, they had an OK first quarter, and maybe they were going to continue to do well, but I sincerely doubt it seeing how every single tech stock has performed this year. Q2 alone blew away $344 million loss compared to Q1's $513 million gain. I also sincerely doubt Twitter was being led well by looking at their earnings reports and the money hole that punctured the company coffers in 2020Q2. The middling performance through 2021 continued when that should've been Twitter's best years, all other tech stocks even ad agencies were printing money, why was Twitter not doing the same? I think Twitter board's best decision they ever made was offloading the company off to Elon, cut their losses for a clearly failing company with little to no headwind coming their way for the next few quarters at minimum. But I do need to know why does Elon get the brunt of the blame for Twitter's presumed downfall? Seems like Twitter was already a falling knife by itself
- pram 4y ago
  Even ignoring EM's post-acquisition decisions, adding $13 billion of debt to the company certainly doesn't help the situation.
  - lmm 4y ago
    It's the right thing to do with a sinking ship that needs to take big risks. Twitter's previous shareholders are surely very happy with how much money he's taken out of bankers' pockets and put into theirs.
- cwilkes 4y ago
  Because Elon caught a falling knife?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
  From Q3 2017 to Q1 2022, Twitter only lost money in two quarters and was obviously profitable overall: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-income-quarterly/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom... Your breathless narration of that data is certainly a master class in spin. Maybe the company was performing far below what would be possible. But it is hard to look at the data and conclude that there was any imminent risk of its demise.
strken 4y ago
That's a bit ridiculous. Buying Twitter for $44bn was entirely his fault (and I think, a very stupid decision) and he does seem to be running the company into the ground, but were the fundamentals of the business solid before he got there? Did it ever justify its share price? Is ad revenue a sustainable business model? Was it going to remain profitable for long enough for someone who bought in e.g. 2020 to make a good return? If you go to market and buy a lame horse then flog it into the ground, that's entirely your fault, but it's not like the horse was ever going to race well.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
  There are answers to all your questions and they come down to; Twitter was making a profit. Maybe it could have been more. But a profitable business is, almost by definition, sustainable. There was no need for rash action.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    Twitter has only had 2 years of positive net income. 2018/2019. So I can’t agree with “Twitter was making a profit” it was bleeding.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    "was". For two years[1], pre pandemic. It's net negative over last 10 years and over last 3-4 years. Worse, revenue[2] increased but costs increased faster By all metrics it was burning money faster than it could increase revenue [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income-of-twitter/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income... [2] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
- drewbeck 4y ago
  I think the analogy is he bought a house that needed a new foundation and he tried to fix it with kerosene and fire. The issues may well have been fixable but he had no sense of what the issues were to begin with, just his ego-driven edgelord perspective.
- 4y ago
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
I mean, Twitter was a slowly sinking ship which he turned into a quickly sinking ship. The guy is entirely to blame for the current situation - engineers and advertisers fleeing - but it’s not like buying it was a clever move in the first place.
concordDance 4y ago
Twitter may fail much faster with Elon doing what he's doing, but failure was going to happen eventually.
ilyt 4y ago
How saying "he's poorly managing it" defending that clown ? "elon badly managing it" and "twitter being a shitshow before he took over" do not collide with eachother either

I'm not quite sure how I'm defending him. I don't really like him, especially after he voiced his opinions on Ukraine and Taiwan, I hope he loses all his money. And I'll never touch a Tesla. All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.

echelon 4y ago
I was a fan for all that Musk did with SpaceX. Single-handedly dropping costs to LEO and creating a civilian / commercial space industry -- mind blowingly impressive, and willed into existence by one man. When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.
- d1sxeyes 4y ago
  That “single-handedly” word is where I think the problem begins…
- cokeandpepsi 4y ago
  The issue here is that he has idiots whispering in his ear this time, the majority of his other ventures he was partnered with decent people it's pretty obvious there's a load of sv vultures egging him on hard to imagine a worse direction for this to go
- phire 4y ago
  I get the impression that others at SpaceX moderate and "manage" him. Let him get distracted with micro-managing whatever cool project is currently takes his fancy, while they do the more boring job of keeping the company running, and making sure the customers are happy. I bet these people are extra happy when he is focusing on projects that don't have customers yet, like Starship/BFR. Twitter might actually be the first time were he has 100% control over a large company without someone in the background moderating his more wild impulses.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    Does he really do anything at SpaceX?
    - conradfr 4y ago
      He fires people, at least. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1593198409367756800 https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1593198409367756800
  - _djo_ 4y ago
    Exactly. Gwynne Shotwell is the too seldom acknowledged hero of SpaceX, who has played exactly that role of keeping the lights on, moderating Musk’s worse impulses, and managing him into less destructive directions. It’s been evident for years. There are similar people at Tesla, who focus on the endless operational tweaking and improvement that Musk finds boring, and who slowly fixed all the most critical issues on the Model 3 line while Musk increasingly took to politics and social media. I’m not one of those who believes Musk hasn’t done anything or played no part in SpaceX or Tesla’s success, because that’s clearly false. But he also hasn’t been the sole genius responsible for all the success or infallible. But too many people have made him believe he was and we’re now seeing the result of that hubris and ignorance.
    - pencilguin 4y ago
      Yet, Gwynne seems happy to lie about suborbital freight for him, and about colonizing Mars. I have not encountered anyone prominent at Tesla supporting his lies about self-driving (though that doesn't mean none do).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kidme5 4y ago
  SpaceX isn't really focused on going to Mars... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33510272#33510919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33510272#33510919
lazide 4y ago
99% of companies would have imploded at the same pace. Offending everyone who matters that runs the product you just bought and terrorizing all your employees is a fast and easy road to completely imploding any company.
- causi 4y ago
  Indeed. I agree with most if not all of the changes Musk made, but it was obvious to anyone that he made them in the worst possible way on the worst possible schedule. He couldn't be doing more damage if he was deliberately trying to tank the company.
- ilyt 4y ago
  He did that idiocy because company wasn't profitable in the first place tho. Like, yeah, if he did that to well functioning company it would fall apart too, but Twitter wasn't a well-functioning company. And by that I mean "he would ruin it slower".
BuckRogers 4y ago
He lost me on Ukraine and Taiwan too. Free democratic societies allowed him to become something. Dictators and Communism for everyone that stands in his way towards more wealth. I was determined to buy a Tesla. Now we placed an order for a VW ID.4.
concordDance 4y ago
I really don't get why people dislike his Ukraine stance. "Beat up Russia a bunch, make peace and throw Russia a bone by letting them keep Crimea." seems like the death minimising stance to me and in the best interests of the inhabitants of the each region.
- tokai 4y ago
  If Russia gets anything out of this war it would be anything but death minimising. It will signal to them, and all other states, that aggressive wars are viable. They are in Ukraine because war has worked out for them in Georgia and Chechnya. You are literally espousing a pro-imperialism stance masquerading as a moderate position.
- caskstrength 4y ago
  Because it is dumb, insensitive to people losing their lives on the the front lines and makes it seem like Russia is _actually willing_ to get out of Ukraine if only it is allowed to keep Crimea, which it clearly is not?
- Deukhoofd 4y ago
  Because Russia has been taking pieces of land from Ukraine since 2014. If you'd hand over more land to Russia now, they'd invade again in a couple of years, with their army stronger than it is now. Besides that, appeasement has never worked against aggressors in the past. It basically looks like Musk is calling for another Munich Agreement. It shows a complete lack of understanding of history, and of international relations.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Why would you "throw a bone" to terrorists ? That would be like saying "let's throw a bone to nazis and let them keep Poland"...
  - wussboy 4y ago
    Because appeasement worked out so well!
dragonwriter 4y ago
> All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. Except that's not true at all. What he did is saddle it with a bunch of debt and fire of a bunch of really-poorly-considered cosr cutting and revenue enhancement ideas that clearly weren’t thought through or part of a coherent strategy. He might have and end-game vision, but he had no plausible roadmap to deal with the sucking wounded he inflcted with the acquisition, much less to get to his end-game vision.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  No sorry. When you have people on Twitter claiming that they should be fixing 10+ years of technical debt to improve performance. And the platform is overrun by bots and spam, issues are not resolved. Complaints dating back 10 years are not addressed in any way. There’s obviously internal problems. If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter. Engineers not being good is probably not the issue. But I’m pretty sure it comes from higher up. It’s also evident that Twitter was poorly managed by the fact it’s pretty much never made a profit.
  - kamaal 4y ago
    >>If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter. It is not just tech debt per se. In larger companies most middle managers have no incentive to fix things for the long term. And lack of automation means they get to hire more people, which is good for them, as it expands their fiefdom. I know one company in California which hires H1-Bs by the thousands, many even make it to Green cards. Their work- Somebody sends a bunch of values from the India office, they manually edit shell scripts(written ages ago, by some dude who has long left), run it, get the values and enter those values into some internal application. The thought that all this could be done by web api's didn't cross their mind. Never mind that automating this simple thing could help cut employee count by the thousands. Another place that I heard of, similar things but with SQL. The whole thing could be automated. But somebody wrote a bunch of shell scripts and left shop. Now people need to take outputs from SQL scripts and feed to the next ones. And then cut paste the data into some system. In the woke world that we live in, where everybody is supposed to be special, and we are supposed to lie to ensure nobody gets hurt feelings. Most people forget, these jobs should have never existed at the first place. Many a times cutting them actually leads to more profits, and saves lots of management effort. Sure people losing jobs is sad, but if you are doing a job that shouldn't exist at the first place, you should likely move before you are let go. The world is full of wasted effort, it is many times even tolerated for all sorts of reasons. But some times it is not.

FormerBandmate 4y ago

Twitter was on pace to lose billions without him. They were doing massive layoffs under Parag, extrapolating Facebook and Snapchat results gets you Twitter’s anemic last reports as a public company even without the overhang of Musk

rchaud 4y ago
On pace to lose billions and yet Musk pays $44bn to acquire the company and hand the CEO a 10-figure golden parachute?
- FormerBandmate 4y ago
  Yeah, why do you think they accepted so quickly? They tried to get Wall Street to be interested and they turned their nose up extremely quickly, and that was right after a 50% price drop
- Maursault 4y ago
  > and hand the CEO a 10-figure golden parachute? That's two figures more than actual. Reportedly, Musk paid Agrawal $42M and spent $120M total on golden parachutes, which is still only low 9 figures. Still obscene. Most employers do not give severance to fired former employees. They were in charge of Twitter while it was losing billions. They should have paid him. He could have saved money right there by giving them the address to the unemployment office.
  - lazide 4y ago
    He got the Twitter shareholders $44bln dollars for a company that has lost money for Decade. Pretty hard to fire him for cause with that track record, even if the new owners don’t like it. And firing without cause triggers the clause.

mdorazio 4y ago

Twitter was already failing, just in slow motion. 10 out of the last 12 years, including last year, the company lost money. I never saw the management team propose or execute on a legitimate path to sustainable profitability, either. Elon is just driving into the ground faster than the largely incompetent leadership team before him did.

b112 4y ago
So what you are saying, is the prior business model did not work, and firing the prior management team, getting rid of complacent employees, and striking out on a new path, is a good idea?
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

latency-guy2 4y ago

Why? The business was weeks away from shutting down in 2015 under original ownership, Twitter looked to be saved from 2018 - 2019, but not really, seeing as 2018-2019 were the only 2 profitable years for Twitter ever Twitter was leaking money for 2020 and 2021, the trend looked to be continuing for 2022, they had an OK first quarter, and maybe they were going to continue to do well, but I sincerely doubt it seeing how every single tech stock has performed this year. Q2 alone blew away $344 million loss compared to Q1's $513 million gain. I also sincerely doubt Twitter was being led well by looking at their earnings reports and the money hole that punctured the company coffers in 2020Q2. The middling performance through 2021 continued when that should've been Twitter's best years, all other tech stocks even ad agencies were printing money, why was Twitter not doing the same? I think Twitter board's best decision they ever made was offloading the company off to Elon, cut their losses for a clearly failing company with little to no headwind coming their way for the next few quarters at minimum. But I do need to know why does Elon get the brunt of the blame for Twitter's presumed downfall? Seems like Twitter was already a falling knife by itself

pram 4y ago
Even ignoring EM's post-acquisition decisions, adding $13 billion of debt to the company certainly doesn't help the situation.
- lmm 4y ago
  It's the right thing to do with a sinking ship that needs to take big risks. Twitter's previous shareholders are surely very happy with how much money he's taken out of bankers' pockets and put into theirs.
cwilkes 4y ago
Because Elon caught a falling knife?
IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
From Q3 2017 to Q1 2022, Twitter only lost money in two quarters and was obviously profitable overall: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-income-quarterly/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom... Your breathless narration of that data is certainly a master class in spin. Maybe the company was performing far below what would be possible. But it is hard to look at the data and conclude that there was any imminent risk of its demise.

strken 4y ago

That's a bit ridiculous. Buying Twitter for $44bn was entirely his fault (and I think, a very stupid decision) and he does seem to be running the company into the ground, but were the fundamentals of the business solid before he got there? Did it ever justify its share price? Is ad revenue a sustainable business model? Was it going to remain profitable for long enough for someone who bought in e.g. 2020 to make a good return? If you go to market and buy a lame horse then flog it into the ground, that's entirely your fault, but it's not like the horse was ever going to race well.

IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
There are answers to all your questions and they come down to; Twitter was making a profit. Maybe it could have been more. But a profitable business is, almost by definition, sustainable. There was no need for rash action.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Twitter has only had 2 years of positive net income. 2018/2019. So I can’t agree with “Twitter was making a profit” it was bleeding.
- ilyt 4y ago
  "was". For two years[1], pre pandemic. It's net negative over last 10 years and over last 3-4 years. Worse, revenue[2] increased but costs increased faster By all metrics it was burning money faster than it could increase revenue [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income-of-twitter/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income... [2] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
drewbeck 4y ago
I think the analogy is he bought a house that needed a new foundation and he tried to fix it with kerosene and fire. The issues may well have been fixable but he had no sense of what the issues were to begin with, just his ego-driven edgelord perspective.
4y ago

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

I mean, Twitter was a slowly sinking ship which he turned into a quickly sinking ship. The guy is entirely to blame for the current situation - engineers and advertisers fleeing - but it’s not like buying it was a clever move in the first place.

concordDance 4y ago

Twitter may fail much faster with Elon doing what he's doing, but failure was going to happen eventually.

ilyt 4y ago

How saying "he's poorly managing it" defending that clown ? "elon badly managing it" and "twitter being a shitshow before he took over" do not collide with eachother either