>Being controllable by one guy who does dumb stuff on a whim?
The entire twitterverse has been complaining loudly about how terrible twitter is for years before Musk considered buying it. The problems are inherent to the product-space, not the owner.
Musk simply came in and screwed with the brand. His ownership didn't really affect the toxicity of the platform as far as I can tell (although he has definitely contributed to it with his personal usage, e.g. dogecoin shilling). If anything, he actually took heat off the overall toxicity by shifting attention to his own actions.
> So what is the difference between Musk and the previous shareholders? The main difference is that Musk put an enormous cost on the business which will be borne by twitters users and advertisers, and that cost brings twitter nothing more than having musk as an owner.
> By himself musk may be no better or worse than the previous shareholders. But just for him to rule over twitter is going to cost twitter a lot of money that will probably reduce the quality of the service.
It seems to me that his product-focused ownership (remember, he's a big user of Twitter) will either make it better or he will run it into the ground (due to naïvety and incompetence in this domain). Both seem like a win/win situation to me.
I think he has very strong incentives to make Twitter better because it is his stage, both for marketing his companies but also to stay int he limelight (ego).
>It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient.
Is it though?
Musk also thought twitter had a bot problem, right up until it became apparent that saying so wouldn't get him out of the Twitter acquisition.
I think the only thing that's clear is that Musk has a Twitter attention addiction, and buying Twitter was the world's wealthiest man buying his favorite toy to play with.
Well, the previous owners of Twitter are laughing with him, all the way to the bank.
>to own his political opponents
I don't see how throwing away a brand does that.
>maybe it was just a mistake he locked himself into
Again, I don't see how that's possible. What he locked himself into was buying Twitter at a stupid price. After he did that he could have simply kept Twitter as it was, which was what he paid for. If he was just going to remake Twitter into something completely different there was no need to buy it at all. He could have just built X from the start. You could argue that what he bought was Twitter's userbase, but that userbase exists because Twitter is the way it is, and there's no guarantee that it'll stick around once Musk finishes turning Twitter into X.
> Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself
Isn't this the best kind of company to acquire ? A product that has such inherent value that even a bumbling clown car of company could not sabotage its ability to retain users. Imo, Reddit and Twitter have monopolized 2 of the most effective forms of communication to have existed on the internet: Forums and memes (memes in the Dawkinian sense) and their tiny size is entirely a result of terrible leadership.
While musk didn't buy it for a particularly cheap price (at least in Winter 2022 prices), He should be able to justify the net worth as well as any competing tech company will be able to.
To quote Charlie Munger:
> Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. These weird guys who overestimate themselves occasionally knock it right out of the park. I would never buy Tesla stock and I would never sell it short.
> It was thus the Twitter major shareholders & leadership that caused this situation.
The Twitter shareholders forced Elon Musk to create a $13 Billion loan to buy Twitter?
That's a pretty nuts take, ya know? The deal was designed by Elon Musk. If market conditions change between March and October, that's not Twitter shareholder's fault, that's Elon Musk's fault for failing to see how the economy would shift.
Once Musk signed the paper in April, it was over. The company was his, no matter how much he tried to squirm or get out of it. To think otherwise is to treat him as some kind of idiot who is incapable of accepting deals or making decisions for himself.
> Now when Musk bought Twitter and thus got ownership fair and square, it does no longer apply?
That’s a false equivalency. We agree that he’s allowed to run twitter however he wants to (barring deliberately running into the ground, which is probably illegal).
We just think he’s an idiot in how he goes about it.
> Dude bought a company. Stay or leave. Why is everyone flailing about so much?
What dude actually did was disrupt communities, which after all the talk about free speech, seems to have been a lot of the point.
Despite whatever personal feeling about Twitter you may have, some people liked it, formed social bonds there, and worked hard to post fun and interesting content. Not all of it was political outrage. Moderation policies were put in place by the old Twitter to make the experience of those people better, and Musk took those protections away. So now those people are in fact leaving after facing a deluge of hate that all of a sudden (for whatever reason) surged when Musk took over. That's the problem. Now my social network is spread across post, mastadon, substack, reddit, and twitter. And for what? To turn Twitter into Truth Social, which itself is trying to be Twitter? It's all so pointless and yet real damage to real relationships is being done.
> Say what you will about Elon and Twitter, but he definitely proved that the majority of the engineers at Twitter were adding no value to the company.
Unless you care about revenue, which has been crushed due to Elon's actions. The company is less healthy than a year ago and still coasting on reserves of previous work and network effects. Musk is spending billions, and refusing to pay valid debts, just to keep the lights on. He admits that the company might end up bankrupt.
It blows my mind that anyone could be touting this as a well run business that others should emulate.
>Twitter is still running and it has a business trajectory that looks positive (subscriptions are great)
I'm generally a fan of Musk, I'm glad he bought Twitter, I drive a Tesla etc. but this looks like delusion to think this.
Twitter is not doing well. Musk cut too fast and too deep, and it shows with the number of outages and problems Twitter has had. It wasn't a few months ago that they had to rate limit everyone from scolling their feed for a day, they had hours of downtime this last month alone.
This is not good for a company that makes its money by serving ads, which it also has seemed to be bad at. Running a blogging site isn't that hard, but runnign your own adnetwork is, and Twitter is doing a pretty bad job.
They are losing quite a lot of moeny according to Musk(!!!).
> Twitter was a minor, failing social media site up until Musk bought it.
Twitter was anything but a minor player in the social media space. Financially, it was treading water due to the difficulty of monetizing its userbase.
What doomed the site was the Elon purchase. The additional debt has basically ensured the sites deterioration, long before Elon started alienating his advertisers and demonstrating his lack of commitment to free speech.
> At Twitter, every move he makes is contrary to his own interests.
While he may drive a Tesla and use Starlink, he didn't create SpaceX or swoop in and take control of Tesla as an obsessive customer with an agenda as a customer.
I don’t think that that entirely explains why Musk Twitter isn’t like Tesla or SpaceX, but I can’t imagine its not a significant factor.
(I also think that, distinct from his customer-agenda, him seeing it as an opportunity to relitigate his finance app history getting booted as CEO of X.com twice before it became PayPal is an issue that impacts more than the names he has used for the companies used in the Twitter acquisition.)
>there is an overreaction to new Twitter management
Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about 200bn USD spent his first day at the office dragging a piece of plumbing around cheerleading his impending job cuts and upcoming $8 surcharge for a feature that only really benefits and legitimizes the platform. he then axes most of the company, especially the moderation team, and acts shocked when brand-safety conscious corporations pull their advertising out of an abundance of caution.
hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process.
If Musk wanted to take a 44bn USD kick to the knackers and spend the end of his year getting deadass roasted on his new social media platform by literally everyone, its a success.
> Imagine a billionaire buying one of the main social media services and some things not going as expected.
If you thought that Musk was going to be beneficial for Twitter in any way, you were deluding yourself about him. Tesla and SpaceX were only successful because competent people did all the thinking and spent a lot of time managing upwards.
> Worst case Musk will run Twitter to the ground and people there will find work elsewhere.
Yeah, that would appear to be what's happening.
> So why all the hate?
For all its many many flaws, I personally enjoyed Twitter, and it was useful to many people. It is irritating to see it ruined by an idiot billionaire.
> This is after we had CORPORATE control of twitter (which they apparently applaud)
... they aren't aplauding it. They are offering suggestions now that twitter is under new ownership, since the previous owners were inept. It's likely that musk is equally inept (or worse.)
The entire twitterverse has been complaining loudly about how terrible twitter is for years before Musk considered buying it. The problems are inherent to the product-space, not the owner.
Musk simply came in and screwed with the brand. His ownership didn't really affect the toxicity of the platform as far as I can tell (although he has definitely contributed to it with his personal usage, e.g. dogecoin shilling). If anything, he actually took heat off the overall toxicity by shifting attention to his own actions.
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