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Twitter New CEO (twitter.com) similar stories update story
43 points by eecc | karma 4200 | avg karma 2.48 2023-05-11 14:46:40 | hide | past | favorite | 47 comments



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Wait, Elon as CTO? I though that this couldn't get worse but somehow it does.

He was already de facto CTO, given his experience with requiring employees to print out code and firing them from it.

And head of product. You know, because of his razor sharp social media product sense.

Elon is focusing more narrowly on the things he is least qualified at, so as to maximize his ability to destroy the firm.

What’s the point of buying a company and running it into the ground if you can’t cosplay as an engineer

The fact that Elon didn't also announce who the CEO will be is very telling.

Given his sense of humor I bet he hired an AI to be CEO.


Meet . . . ‘Elona’!

I saw one article that quoted him as saying 'she' will be starting... my first thought was that it will be Grimes. Doing something like that seems totally in-keeping with Musk's style.

My first thought was Shivon Zilis. Elon seems to like to keep his inner circle tight.

> I saw one article that quoted him as saying 'she' will be starting...

The tweet reads:

> Excited to announce that I’ve a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!


Wasn’t there a child protection activist, somewhat related to the Trump-sphere, that used to court him during the first months of his tenure?

I hope he hasn’t taken that bait…


I think one of the Twitter execs is the CEO. This entire exercise is to allow him to distance himself from the dumpster he set on fire.

It's not him kidding. Also his "humor", stolen memes aside, 9/10 times only used to mask unexpected turn of events behind the scenes (such as being sued about something he said, or something turning out really, really wrong).


Stolen memes? What an odd concept.

Normal people would retweet someone's content or quote it, unless they want to change it in some way that requires posting it as their own. Or moving it to a media where it can't be directly shared with attribution.

That's what normal people do. This is, in fact, why when Musk posts a meme, that tweet gets thousand of retweets. Ever thought about how if "stolen meme" was an odd concept, then the retweet count would be 0?


It's an odd concept by just the traditional definition of the term; being copied and redistributed (regardless of attribution) en mass is just the way that memes propagate to begin with.

Zooming in on both the twitter use case, and how most users of those platforms see meme ~= funny image or OC, a stolen meme is more akin to stealing a joke.

So "stolen memes" is a phrase that makes zero sense for the broader definition of the word meme, but makes complete sense for the more specific definition.


His sense of humour is so cringe, he is trying so hard to be in touch with Gen Z humour.

So looking back over the past 6 months of Twitter under Elon Musk, it is safe to say that after all the outrage and senseless screeching over the layoffs, Twitter has still survived with its ~220M+ daily active users (DAU) and there was little to no 'migration' or even a sign of Twitter completely collapsing as that was incorrectly predicted. [0] [1]

How the media has fooled almost everyone here and has taken advantage of basic human psychology to sensationalize headlines and distractions to create hysteria to gather clickbait and eyeballs of its readers since they still rely heavily on getting their online news from Twitter.

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33701371


I did notice an increase in UI glitches. I guess the codebase is just as flaky as it has ever been, but they used to canary their changes so gradually that 99% problems were caught at that stage

> Twitter has still survived with its ~220M+ daily active users (DAU)

The same figure Elon claimed was mostly bots?


The Twitter android app sometimes manages to freeze my entire phone. It never did this pre Elon and no other app even ones that crash manage to freeze the entire phone.

What the media said is irrelevant.

Those who have experience with such projects predicted very accurately what will happen.

1) The basic service will mostly stay up one way or another. Because otherwise all is lost.

2) Many auxiliary services will start degrading or going away. For example, yesterday search autocomplete was disabled after it started autocompleting everything in obscene ways.

3) We'll experience more frequent outages and glitches (and we do).

4) His velocity will grind to a halt. Meaning, he can't ship new features at depth, only superficial crap, and things that were started long before he bought the company.

He's also deeply in red right now, after losing over half his ad revenue and the 600k or so blue checkmark subscribers are netting him about 1% of what he lost in ads.


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You broke the HN guidelines extremely badly here. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.


You broke the HN guidelines in this thread. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.


i'll admit i thought twitter would have been done far sooner than this, but it's still dying a slow death.

https://mashable.com/article/half-of-twitter-blue-earliest-s...

initial twitter blue users aren't resubscribing so i'm not sure how they'll recoup money there

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitters-advertising-busi...

> Research firm Insider Intelligence this week slashed its forecast for Twitter's global ad revenue this year by 37% to $2.98 billion. That would represent a 28% decline from Twitter's 2022 ad revenue of $4.14 billion.

so yeah, they're dying, just not as fast as some of us predicated


how could it be dying when all the facts point to active users being at an all time high. A random estimate by someone who doesn't even access to twitters internal data about twitter blue subscription isn't even relevant to the "is Twitter dying" conversation.

DAU was at an all time high immediately after Elon's takeover due to the circus. It's not at an all time high right now. Notice he stopped bragging about DAU few months ago. It's actually 10% less than a year ago. I know I'm completely wasting my effort on you, so I'm done with this thread.

wrong. it has gone through multiple all time highs per musk. even recently as per this interview https://youtu.be/ypZNWjPpOuI

> According to insiders cited by the paper of record, Twitter's adjusted earnings reportedly fell about 40 percent year-over-year following an advertiser exodus that occurred when Musk took it private.

> Some Twitter users said gory videos appeared in their "For You" pages with no warning, renewing debate about platform responsibility and the news value of such media.

Hmm, I wonder if advertisers are pulling out of twitter now that they can no longer guarantee brand safety because their products might show up next graphic videos of shooting victims. But hey, a bunch of active bots are probably making a ton of money for the site.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2023/03/09/can-twitt...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/graphic-video-texas-m...


search autocomplete on twitter is currently disabled because as of a few days ago, if you searched "dog" or "cat", the top results apparently would be videos of animals being tortured.

I'm sure advertisers will love having their content next to animals being maimed and mutilated. Guess all those people who got laid off weren't doing much except preventing millions of users from seeing dogs being dismembered.


Going to predict he’s completely unable to not meddle in the decisions of the CEO, and either the CEO is as erratic as he is and is fine with it or she is not and is no longer in the role within a short amount of time.

Why did he write "X/Twitter"?

Because X is now the legal entity behind Twitter, and Twitter is the product now, AFAIK

The copyright notice on Twitter now points to X too.

> My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.

What else is there? Sounds like the new CEO may be a figurehead just to satisfy his previous "promise" to step down.


Human resources, finance, sales, marketing, legal, customer service...

Twitter is a tech company. Would you feel like the CEO of a tech company if you weren't overseeing the tech and software? Will Musk answer or defer to the CEO with regard to product decisions? I suspect not...

I think the idea that people had, especially Tesla stockholders, is that Musk would kind of step back from Twitter and re-focus on Tesla.


I don't know, I'm not really sure how many subscriptions they've sold. If you listen to his detractors, it's barely anything. If you listen to him directly, it saved Twitter. If the numbers are disappointing but significant, it might make sense to mothball tech and product. Basically treat it as a dying MMO.

Long term this is not a winning strategy, but it might be the best way to minimize losses.


> I think the idea that people had, especially Tesla stockholders, is that Musk would kind of step back from Twitter and re-focus on Tesla.

You mean just because he said that, explicitly, under oath, in the Tesla shareholder lawsuit that overlapped with the Twitter purchase?


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So the CTO reports to the CEO who reports to the chairman. Who is the CTO. That circle just about guarantees that the fireworks will continue.

> So the CTO reports to the CEO who reports to the chairman. Who is the CTO.

Also, the chairman reports to the board who report to the single shareholder (the corporate parent of X Corp which is X Holdings Corp) which reports ultimately to X Holding Corps shareholders which are…the same person as the CTO and Chairman of X Corp.


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