If I didn't know better, I'd be wondering if Musk was shorting Twitter's stock. Has anyone ever managed to do so much damage to a company in such a short amount of time?
Shorting Twitter, out of the public eye, on the other hand, is perfectly Musk-like approach (see previous Tesla stock manipulation). Simple and efficient
Did you know that Musk's acquisition put Twitter under massive debt and his actions chasing off advertisers means they're losing even more money by the day?
Twitter was a mess prior to Musk, but stable enough to remain afloat. When Musk acquired it, it became a flaming hot mess. Layoffs like these is like treating an infected finger with amputation. It temporarily solves the problem, but then you're still left without a finger.
Based on the most recent estimates of Twitter's value, Musk has already train wrecked 10s of billions of dollars.
You mention that Twitter isn't that fundamentally different and from a product perspective, and I would mostly agree, but their finances are WAY worse than they were pre-Musk. The company has lost something like 50% of ad revenue, they've saddled themselves with something like an extra $1B dollars a year in debt payments from the buyout, and they're facing a number of large lawsuits based on how they handled layoffs.
Twitter before this wasn't doing great, but they had cash on hand to last for years. Since taking over Musk has slashed costs by getting rid of benefits and laying people off, but also slashed income by alienating advertisers. Along with doing things like saying in a court hearing that the FTC consent decree on Twitter isn't binding which is opening them up to legal liability. The company is overall in far worse shape now then it was when he took over.
Musk's actions have certainly damaged Twitter and its engineering. When you set the house on fire of course some termites will get killed but then you might also kill some babies and the family dog.
A lot of tech companies have bloat in the form of AI ethics people, DEI people and so on. They need to go. But Musk probably hurt twitter a lot in short term by firing a lot of engineers and making it a place that made people unhappy.
Yep.
Twitter and Musk are screwed. The question now is how fast Musk will bring about Twitter's demise, how painful it will be, and where that pain will fall.
Musk might have been right about some things. There probably was some degree of bloat. But to say he's badly mishandled this whole saga is a gross understatement. It is very difficult to utterly kill a site like Twitter; the fact that we're even considering that as a realistic possibility shows just how badly.
I think Musk is used to Tesla and SpaceX, which are both companies that a lot of people are (or at least were) excited to work for because they believe in the mission and what's being created. Plus there aren't many alternatives if you want to do that work. Twitter really isn't like that for most people; a Twitter developer has many other options to do similar work. Add to that the fact that he's both cranked up the intensity of the abuse and that it's more visible to everyone, and you can't expect a lot of good people to stick around. And despite the fact that it might coast for quite a while on the back of excellent work in the past, eventually you do need good people to keep a business going. (This is leaving aside the direct impacts of his actions on users and advertisers!)
The brand value of the word "Twitter" was probably in the billions, and Musk just wiped it away. It was ruined so thoroughly that we can only intelligently talk about it by calling Twitter by its former name because its new name is confusing to even say in conversation.
Twitter's advertising revenue fell off a cliff almost overnight due in no small part to their owner's policy of loudly and publicly attacking individual Twitter advertisers for leaving Twitter.
Twitter had tens of thousands of the most famous celebrities in the world actively participating every day for free, and Musk managed to screw that up in myriad ways, not least of which by falsely labeling them as paid subscribers.
For some godforsaken reason, Twitter's opinion on who and was "notable" or not was a significant status symbol, and Twitter started selling that status symbol for $8/month.
Twitter had a truly impressive internal talent pool, and it's largely gone, ruining their ability to pivot at a time when the whole plan appears to be "wildly pivot."
Twitter was almost certain to see layoffs had Musk not bought it, but they’d have been slower, more considered, less harmful, and probably smaller because the company didn’t have a ludicrous leveraged buyout $1bn annual debt bill.
The way things are going now there’s an increasingly real possibility that Twitter may not exist in a few months, putting the jobs of the other 3000 or so employees at risk too. Not to mention all the people who used Twitter to make a living.
The destruction of lives and so much value for one man’s ego is astounding.
Twitter wasn't in the red. It was roughly break even, with way over half of quarters in past 5 years profitable pre-Musk. You bought a history rewrite peddled by Musk himself. Twitter was never a failing company. It was just a mediocre company. But now... now it's a rapidly failing company, propped up by Musk selling a few billion in TSLA shares late last year.
There could be a whole course on the fall of Twitter. Musk has also wiped out 50%+ of the company value, which for a company of that size is wild. There's also the psychological side to study. Like/dislike Musk, he's done great with Tesla. Whatever skill(s) he has there has not transferred to Twitter.
Yup. Thing is though, nothing about their financial situation justifies this level of recklessness. Yes, there’s an urgent need to cut costs and find new sources of revenue, thanks to Musk’s own decisions to perform a leveraged buyout and then scare off advertisers. But that doesn’t justify making such sweeping changes in so short a time that there’s no way a proper due diligence is being done.
Honestly, I suspect the issue is much simpler. I think Musk detests and can’t bring himself to respect Twitter’s engineers at all, thanks to preconceptions he developed on the outside. That’s why he’s so happy to mock and trash their work in public, why he wanted to get rid of half of them without even giving them the courtesy of speaking to them, and why he believes he knows better. Expect most of those remaining to be replaced as soon as Musk finds other willing saps to take their places.
It’s the same reason so many of Musk’s fans, including a bunch of people on HN, reacted with such evident glee at seeing Twitter engineers being laid off. That’s not a healthy mindset.
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
I found it odd that both the New York Times and The Washington Post had top stories about how terrible things were at Twitter now that Musk took over. A few days is hardly enough time to decide that a new leader has destroyed a company.
That is because most Twitter users knew Musk would ruin what made Twitter Twitter. Twitter users just assumed the process of "muskifying" Twitter would be subtle and over the course of years. Watching him speed run the destruction of a $44 Billion company in a matter weeks has been absolutely shocking.
It's astonishing how much benefit of the doubt Elon Musk gets from his cult of personality. Whether or not he's smart, the things he's doing at Twitter are /glaringly/ not smart from a business perspective: He's driven away advertisers, alienated users, crippled system resilience by firing so many engineers, and set the stage for dozens of lawsuits that will run the gamut from employment law to SEC oversight to EU compliance. Twitter is burning, and it's increasingly hard to see how genius Elon Musk is going to salvage it when he keeps throwing gasoline on the fire.
If you were presented this whole debacle in an anonymized format, without Elon Musk's name attached, how would you judge these actions?
Musk is "trying" to save Twitter after the $1B+ annual interest debt which he chose to saddle it with.
It's an interesting strategy so far, treating people like dirt and spooking the advertisers with his chaotic decisions, the net effect adds up to damaging Twitter's biggest source of cash — advertisment deals.
In another version of our timeline, Musk took the reigns and kept things running relatively smoothly while digging deep to actually understand the system and form a coherent strategy before enacting wide-scale platform changes. He's missed an enormous opportunity lead through an inspiring vision.
In our timeline, we have an immature fool making a very public mess. It's undeniably entertaining and stranger than fiction. But I feel terrible for the employees, real living breathing human beings, suffering at The Hand of His Royal Majesty.
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