6 ms·
The Twitter layoffs being used as proof of _anything_ is misguided no matter what you're trying to say. If success is losing half their revenue, reverting to r
by hirsin 7mo ago
The Twitter layoffs being used as proof of _anything_ is misguided no matter what you're trying to say.
If success is losing half their revenue, reverting to revenue numbers from a decade ago, I gotta know what failure looks like. You might argue that the revenue losses aren't correlated to their headcount changes and probably make a good argument, but I mean... It's not a great one
- Raidion 7mo agoReally? Revenue loss was pretty directly tied to Elon replying and supporting some "jews vs whites" type posts in Nov 2023. That caused Apple, Coke, and many other large clients to stop advertising.
- hirsin 7mo agoThat would be the good argument, yes.
- YokoZar 7mo agoElon very publicly killed brand safety efforts. Advertisers care a lot about the context that their ads appear in.
- abirch 7mo agoMy understanding is that Twitters revenue was 5 billion in 2021 4.4 billion in 2022 (When Elon made bid and took over company) 3.4 billion in 2023 2.6 billion in 2024 2.9 billion in 2025
- joker666 7mo agoWhat's the operational cost now? 10K to 2K employees. 30 Engineers.
- otterley 7mo agoIt doesn’t cost much to keep the lights on. As far as I know, X post-acquisition is not investing in innovation anymore. Musk might have been right that shifting to KTLO mode was a good idea, but the company would still be better off if someone other than him had bought it and done the same thing.
- DoesntMatter22 7mo agoMo biggie on revenue loss. They axed most of their staff and went from 2k devs to 30. Trade off seems fine
- otterley 7mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47176049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47176049
- DoesntMatter22 7mo agoI couldn't possibly disagree with this more. Since the acquisition Twitter/X has had far more features at a far faster pace than in the 10 years prior. They've added all sorts of great stuff, and recently have been near the top of the charts in the Apple App Store.
- otterley 7mo agoWhat features are you referring to?
- DoesntMatter22 7mo agoThere's more but this is a most of them. X Premium subscription tiers (Basic, Premium, Premium+) with paid blue checkmark verification Post editing (limited window). Longer posts (up to 25,000 characters). Longer video uploads (up to hours and multi-GB files). For You algorithmic feed and Following chronological tab. Grok AI chatbot integration (with image/video generation via Grok Imagine). Audio and video calls (encrypted). XChat encrypted messaging with vanishing messages and file sharing. Creator revenue sharing from ads and engagement. Creator subscriptions for paywalled content. Articles for long-form publishing. Community Notes expansion (crowdsourced fact-checking). Communities for interest-based groups. Bookmark folders. Reader mode for threads. Reply prioritization for Premium users. X Pro (advanced tools like multi-timelines and search). Media Studio for managing uploads. Job search and hiring features. Starter Packs for curated follows. Video reactions/responses. Priority notifications tab. Enhanced cashtags with real-time info. Global trending emphasis in Explore. Widgets for iOS home/lock screen. Updated payouts based on verified impressions. Topic selection in For You feed. Free Premium access for high-follower accounts (>2,500 verified followers get Premium; >5,000 get Premium+)
- _heimdall 7mo agoI've never seen the motivation behind buying Twitter to have been revenue, or free speech for that matter. Elon wanted a unique content source to train LLMs on and he got it. Whether that proves out as a good training dataset is still up in the air, but I can't imagine he cared about Twitter revenue.
- sreekanth67 7mo agoThis is not even intended for the LLM training use case. it is an afterthought use case. He installed a president who he can use. Twitter acquisition helped him achieve this.
- _heimdall 7mo agoOh I don't think Trump needed Elon buying Twitter to win his second term. The Democrats basically handed it to him with the whole Biden/Harris fiasco.
- platevoltage 7mo agoIf by that you mean their unrelenting support for Israel, then yes, That was the reason.
- _heimdall 7mo agoOh sorry, no I meant them shoving Biden into the candidacy despite clear health issues, shutting down any primary challenge, and swapping Harris in late in the game when it was abundantly clear Biden's health was a problem.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- com2kid 7mo agoEveryone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs. It didn't. Anyone who has worked at a large company knows that 1/2 the staff there is stuck keeping the lights on because it is easier to hire a warm body than fix tech debt. I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices. Even within large companies, you can have orgs that are dramatically more effective than others, often due to having to work under just the right set of resource constraints. Too little and no investments in the future, too much and it becomes easiest to build fast and hire people to duct tape the mess that is left behind.
- smileysteve 7mo agoYou and the poster above disagree about the state of Twitter. Twitter had been a growth company, it was early/missed the market with Vine, but was showing ad growth. Now, as a private company, backed by the world's richest man, sovreign wealth funds, and banks that have written down their stakes, it has different economics than a tech / growth company. It's ad revenue is now, not in the ballpark of the fortune 500 or trendy Instagram ads, but somewhere between reddit and sin site markets.
- kranke155 7mo agoThe purpose of Twitter is IMO no longer to be profitable. For a man with a trillion dollar fortune it’s just his personal equivalent of Fox News, a way to shape the nations conversation. Plus a way to get data for xAI. In that regard it’s a huge sucess. I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective. Grok is also nowhere as bad as it should be (it’s still not great).
- ben_w 7mo agoShape national conversations*, sure. A way to get data for xAI? Eh, I guess. But it's a source of bad data. Most social media is, even the best case is stuff like Stack Overflow. It wouldn't surprise me if this was at least a strong component of why Grok called itself "Mecha Hitler". Huge success? Unfortunately I have to agree, given the US government still ended up integrating it despite the Mecha Hitler incident. > I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective. As with all of these things, I have to ask: How confident are you that it's telling you true things, rather than just true-sounding things? My expectation is Grok will be overtraining on benchmarks (even relative to the others, who will also be doing so at least a bit), and Grok's benchmarks will include twitter reactions, and it will be Goodhart's-law-ing itself in the process to maximally effective rhetoric rather than maximally effective (even by the standards of other LLMs) "truth-seeking". * plural, not "the", it also works in at least the UK as well as the US
- ulfw 7mo agoHe's a VC now. That's how they think
- mike_hearn 7mo agoFor that to be true, the revenue loss would have to be related to the loss of headcount, e.g. due to downtime or other issues. Rather the revenue loss was due to an advertiser boycott driven by Elon's rejection of woke politics. That wouldn't apply to other tech companies that made similarly deep layoffs. Look at it this way. Could Google lay off 70% of employees and keep the lights on, even still launching some new features on core properties, whilst preserving revenue? It'd be surprising if the answer was no.