>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(!!!).
> 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.
> It seems to me Twitter's being run these days by an entrepreneur who's trying hard to figure out ways to make it a profitable operation.
Twitter was only losing 200-million in 2021.
The $1.3 Billion in loan-payments, followed up by the $2.5 Billion loss in advertisement revenue means that Elon Musk is personally responsible for a NEGATIVE $3.8 Billion differential in just 9 months of running the company.
You realize that, right? Twitter has _NEVER_ in its history lost this much money before.
I'm not sure how long it can go losing money like this. But I know it can't lose money forever, especially in a rising interest-rate environment, and double-especially on private equity. Eventually, Elon Musk will cut his losses and just shut the whole thing down.
So I'm not going to place a time-limit on when this all collapses and Elon Musk gives up on the project. I mean, I've seen how he dealt with SolarCity (a shady merger into Tesla to hide the fact that that other company also collapsed). So maybe Twitter "survives" through technicality in any case. Musk is very good at making failures look like a success (aka: exploded rocket was a successful test effect), he'll find a way to declare this $3.8 Billion / year loss a success too and have his fans eat up his story.
But I've already made my opinion up about this situation. Anyone who takes a company who is losing $0.2 billion/year and turns it into a company losing $3.8 billion/year in 9 months is... not a good businessman.
>All the debt you mention? He saddled them with that.
No, Twitter was already in debt. The alternative was letting it die, which mind you I don't think would have been a bad idea, but if Musk's goal is to keep it alive then the huge amounts of debt would certainly do that.
>Unfortunately he did that at the expense of site stability & reliability.
The site did not have the efficiency or importance to warrant the number of employees it had.
Down from super high is still high. Still profitable company with an incredibly high market cap.
> Twitter is not profitable, heavily indebted, and likely loosing a lot of traffic.
Twitter's market cap hasn't change much. The perception of it losing value and being in trouble has a lot more to do with people's personal feeling (ironically expressed on X), rather than economics. It wasn't profitable when he bought it and it's not profitable now. It's still worth roughly what he bought it for.
> SpaceX is one of the most promising opportunities for him, and even that has huge structural risks due to clients being governments and is barely (rarely) profitable.
By your own admission, profitable and future projects are set to make it more even more profitable. Governments are the least risky clients there are.
> The boring company, neurolink, etc are barely real companies, they're just vanity projects for him.
That he spends relatively little money on, hardly worth mentioning, either positive or negative.
>Twitter stock price was higher than Musk’s offer for most of 2021.
That's cute but the past is gone. Twitter is clearly going downhill, both with their product and with their management (good thing they got rid of Dorsey, but perhaps that was too little too late), the stock just follows on that. If anything, people like Musk are the ones who still attract interest to the platform.
>Twitter can bring more value to shareholders with or without Elon
Twitter is on a very dangerous spot right now, their MAUs peaked long ago as young people go to other platforms, and overall, everyone is a bit of tired of the kind of discourse that predominates there, for instance, Trump was banned and I STILL find out everything about him because the people there (left and right-wing) are absolutely obsessed with him.
Honestly, Twitter is the one social media platform that I wouldn't really mind if it just disappeared. At least Facebook has some family members in there and some pictures from my earlier years. Twitter brings nothing of value to my life and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels like that.
>It's clear that Twitter is going down the drain sooner or later because Musk exceeded the limits of his competence.
I don't think it's a question of competence. Musk bought a company that was already losing billions, and saddled it with debt and billions of interest payments per year. His recent actions also cost near-term ad-revenue loss, thereby further amplifying losses.
As bad as those things are, in-and-of themselves, they don't represent an existential crisis.
The problem is that he actually cannot afford to float Twitter until such time that the company becomes profitable (if ever). Hence the drastic cost-cutting measures.
> 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.
Before you reply about the obviously lower valuation over the last few years, take a look at some comparable companies: https://companiesmarketcap.com/
The economic realities of Musk's ventures does not align with what seems to be the zeitgeist opinion of him as a person.
> Their track record of content persistence is excellent.
Musk has just replaced the entire leadership of Twitter. What kind of track record Twitter used to have is entirely irrelevant for how it will behave in the future.
It's the same fallacy like a reputable company selling a well-known brand. People will stick to the brand (for a while) because they associate it with the performance of the original company behind it. However, that's a deception. The brand itself will tell you nothing about how the new company will behave.
> I can believe he's very smart, but he's also wildly irrational.
Yes, this is more or less what I believe. Or to be more precise, I think over the past 5-7 years his fame, attention, and power have corrupted him.
> He's also been caught out since taking over Twitter of broadcasting very inaccurate things about the state of Twitters software stack.
I don't remember ever seeing a valid example of this. I do remember people dunking on things he said at various times, but those people were wrong, and he was right. Nearly all the Musk haters predicted Twitter would collapse after he fired half the staff, that it would fall apart. Former engineers wrote op eds about how it would happen. None of it did.
The particular instance to which I think you're referring was some front-end enginee attempting to falsify Musks's claims about how content was loaded, but the frontend engineer clearly didn't understand that Musk was talking about the micro-services that stitch together the feeds loaded by the front end code. Now, Musk may have been wrong - I don't know what Twitter's architecture looks like inside, but the guy who was criticizing him didn't either.
> Hyperfocus on the software is also definitely the wrong thing to be worrying about when it comes to running a content company and he's only made the product worse in his time there and has shown close to zero understanding what makes the site valuable.
I'm not sure I agree. I did think that at first, but I think he actually does understand what makes the site valuable - the users, and diversified revenue streams. He hasn't fully achieved that, but he has time. A social media site where you actually buy the product instead of being the product is what people have claimed to want here for quite a while.
He could certainly be lying. He no longer has the kind of obligations not to that a public company does. But the idea that Twitter is dying or dead is just not the case. He certainly overpaid for it, and I don't think every move he's made has been good, but he's iterated rapidly, and been willing to revert unpopular changes quickly.
It wasn't. It's been profitable every quarter except 2 since late 2017.
Musk chose to load Twitter with massive debt when he bought it which is why it's now financially struggling after the buy out. That's not due to Twitter, that's due to Musk.
> Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat (thus he didn't have to be overly concerned with his actions promptly sinking the ship)?
I don’t think he cared [0], because he’s always wanted to gut Twitter and remake it as a a very different service that is not really in the same market (very different substantive functions and revenue model.)
On the other hand he seems to have very not-evidence-based and turns-out-to-be-wrong-at-every-step map of how to get from a ad-supported microblogging platform to a user-pays long-form-content-and-financial-services platform.
[0] It did, through network effexts, but his plans were incompatible with focussing on preserving it.
> You know how Musk promises one thing and delivers something else? I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person - that is understands what is a good product.
No, in the case of Twitter he clearly doesn't. Twitter's business model is advertising, yet he's been driving them away since he's started.
Even in the user-facing side he made a weird mess with the blue checkmarks that was completely unnecessary, didn't make anything better and only created confusion.
>twitter gives us a great case study how often the massive headcount is focused on revenue generation activities the user isn’t privy to
Does it? Twitter the product has been fine (barring clumsy design changes driven by Musk) after the massive downsizing, and they still make billions. I was under the impression a lot of the lost revenue was because of Musk's caustic image that made brands pull their campaigns from the platform.
> This is objectively false, he misread Twitter's quarterly statements...
Whether it's objectively true or false is irrelevant. What I said was it changed his view of the company's value which resulted in him acknowledging that his estimation of Twitter's worth had dropped.
And while I don't disagree that Musk had a different interpretation of mDAU than Twitter did, I don't sign onto the assertion that how 2022 Twitter's view of the world is anything like objective. These numbers have been considered controversial and suspicious long before Musk's interest in Twitter.[0] Twitter had a history of dodgy numbers.[1] And there was substantial evidence that Twitter was turning a blind eye to bot traffic in their mDAU analyses.[2]
> Elon is big on move fast and break things but I think he is going to hard and will destroy Twitter if he continues at this pace.
Is there still any doubt about that?
The only way forward where I think Twitter may be salvaged is if Musk steps away from it right now but I don't think his ego would allow him to admit to such a failure. So down it is.
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(!!!).
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