How do you solve the problem that is Twitter? It's a toss-up between Elon Musk's management misadventures and Twitter's technical troubles as to which will cause the most damage. Twitter is in trouble. I mean, who blunders his way into a fight with Apple only to later claim it was all a misunderstanding? But, as idiotic as that is combined with alienating advertisers, …
Given that Twitter's "technical difficulties" result from Musk's "management style", it's all on Musk no matter how you slice it.
IT is not hardware manufacturing, which is all Musk really has experience with. He's 44 billion dollars in over his head, and he won't be "the richest man in the world" by a long shot within 12 months, maybe even as little as 6.
IT is not hardware manufacturing, which is all Musk really has experience with. He's 44 billion dollars in over his head, and he won't be "the richest man in the world" by a long shot within 12 months, maybe even as little as 6.
Musk is arguably a software guy rather than a hardware guy. This is demonstrable from the number of hardware failures originating from his general direction. Or just a large divergence between claims and reality. Hyperloop wasn't anything new, and probably sounded simple on paper. Reality gave us Teslas in a drainpipe, not supersonic pods zooming along vacuum tubes.
So that's potentially a good thing. Plus he still has a shedload of cash he can throw at developers to build the messaging app of his dreams. Plus there are still a lot of people who believe in Musk, and may be happy to work under his.. rather unique management style.
What he may not have are the people or political skills. Much of the issues are also somewhat outside his control. So in theory, moderation should be pretty simple. Is this comment legal? Yes/No. People Twitter had in post to make those decisions (eg Yoel) weren't qualified or competant to make those determinations. Nor were others, eg the laptop story was ToS'd due to a 'hacked materials' policy. But Twitter's policy also suggested that that policy required some official determination from law enforcement that a hack had occurred. That may have happened with the FBI and others pushing the narrative that it was 'Russian misinformation', but that's a claim that's turned out to be untrue.
That could be fixed by having more moderators from a legal/law enforcement background, and maybe silencing Tweets, until facts might be verified. But that's also complicated by areas where Twitter also censored stuff it's employees didn't like, or at the behest of government like around Covid. Determining the truth there would be more challenging, especially when it involved something new & novel. But both these areas demonstrated pretty clear violations of the First Amendment, for aguably political reasons, and caused harm.
I'm from Mars. You're an AC..
No, it couldn't.
Care to expand on that? Your trade is supposedly one that understands the law. Most Twitter moderators wouldn't. Taking down illegal content is just a legal (and moral) obligation for content providers, but in itself has legal implications, ie defamation etc.
No, it didn't.
Well.. it's panto season, so.. Yes it did? Again, care to explain why? One aspect of the story is again the laptop. Twitter cancelled the story, blocked a newspaper based on demonstrably false claims. So the laptop 'was stolen'. It wasn't, it had been abandoned. It was 'Russian misinformation', but it wasn't.
I'm not a lawyer, but this seems problematic. I guess you could argue that the DNC isn't government, but the narrative was propped up by the FBI, and branches of DHS, who are. I guess future defendants will argue that when the FBI told Twitter to watch out for 'Russian misinformation', they weren't specifically referring to the Biden laptop, even though Guilliani and Breitbart had been under surveillance at the time. If Twitter just inferred they were referring to the Biden story, that's their mistake.
What the democrats asked to block were pictures of Hunter Biden's dick. There were members of Trump's campaign involved in this whole process, this was not some secret democrat run operation to prevent people from learning about Hunter Biden's laptop.
And even if you take all the claims as truth, and Hunter Biden was trading access for cushy contracts and his laptop contains the proof, so what? Trump's daughter and twit husband did far worse in their time in the White House, where's the outrage over her getting all her long delayed trademarks approved in China shortly after Trump became president? Or Jared getting $2 billion of Saudi blood money to manage after he let MBS skate by after bone sawing a US resident despite having zero experience in managing a hedge fund?
It is hilarious how republicans keep going to Hunter Biden because they can't even dig up any useful dirt on Joe Biden, a man who has been a politician for 50 years and rose all the way to the White House! I mean, there's no way you are in politics that long or rise that high without being hip deep in sewage, but republicans stay focused on Hunter Biden when the rest of the country couldn't care less what he may have done because he's an irrelevant nobody.
All because they want to distract attention from their criminal orange insurrectionist, who will be indicted in about a half dozen separate cases over the next few years and is clearly guilty of most if not all of it.
Biden is up to his neck in the current Ukraine, that's why it matters, that a coup took place while Biden was VP.
His kid being on the board of a gas company in Ukraine, the massive amount of money being stolen from the tax payers of the world for "Arm" which may never have existed.
Trump and Biden are alike, racists with a long history of corruption and multiple credible sexual abuse allegations.
Both Zionists with contempt for humanity and international Law.
The idea that company A can prevent the population from being aware of such things, is not partisan, it's just wrong.
Trump just the honest face of America as the world sees it, only the utterly delusional think otherwise.
"this was not some secret democrat run operation to prevent people from learning about Hunter Biden's laptop."
Except that Musk claims evidence of DNC members working with Twitter execs to filter the Washington Post article, which would indeed show a secret democrat run operation for just that purpose.
Who said it was. Biden and Trump are both shitbirds, twitter is subject to pressure of all kinds and suppresses content according to people they'd rather keep happy.
If stuff is true but embarrassing to $richdude $private company shouldn't get to suppress that. When that amount to manufatoring consent for things which lead to massive loss of life, and enormous corruption, that's also rather bad.
Biden and Trump, are alike, bigots suffering from obvious senile decline. The laptop thing is nonsense, the guy went to people and said my dad's the VP, give me a job, well he got a job, so did the VEEP deliver. That Biden JR's got some pictures where he's high is immaterial.
"It is hilarious how republicans keep going to Hunter Biden because they can't even dig up any useful dirt on Joe Biden"
Getting dirt on Joe Biden could be a happy byproduct of tabulating Hunter's activities. Going after Joe individually is a waste of money. Joe is way past his sell-by date and it's painfully obvious whenever he's allowed in public and given any time to make unscripted remarks. Even having a prepared speech doesn't work more than 50% of the time. The easiest and cheapest thing to do is to keep handing as much rope as Joe will take and let him hang himself. I would not be surprised if it does turn out to be Jill Biden and a backroom of handlers pulling Joe's strings.
"... But both these areas demonstrated pretty clear violations of the First Amendment, for arguably political reasons, and caused harm."
The first amendment has clearly NOT been violated. Learn some basics about the U.S. Constitution and U.S. system of government before making such pronouncements.
In a nutshell, the U.S. Constitution enshrines we, the people, with certain "inalienable rights". The deep, beautiful and brilliant insight of its authors was that people need protection from their own government, which freedom of speech helped to ensure.
Thus the 1st amendment is a limit on THE U.S. GOVERNMENT's power to regulate we the people's speech. It has nothing to do with a private company's regulating people who use that private company's network, chats, blogs, etc.
The late Larry Flint, owner of Penthouse, was sued for defamation by turd TV televangelist Reverend Jerry Falwell, for showing a cartoon of Falwell losing his virginity while ?sodomizing his mother. The case, revolving around free speech, went to the SCOTUS. During pre-trial of an earlier free speech case, Flint called the 9 justices (8 men and 1 woman) "8 assholes and a token c*nt". The court ruled that parody, even if objectionable, was protected free speech.
So please stop bellyaching about private Twitter limiting speech. There is no such legal protections for users of Twitter, and the 1st Amendment doesn't come into it.
Thus the 1st amendment is a limit on THE U.S. GOVERNMENT's power to regulate we the people's speech. It has nothing to do with a private company's regulating people who use that private company's network, chats, blogs, etc.
Way to miss the point. So I report you to the mods for being wilfully deceptive in your interpretation of the Constitution. The mods may or may not decide I'm right, and delete your post, or ban you entirely. All pretty much legal because their site, their rules.
If instead I'm from say, the FBI, and mail Twitter from my FBI account demanding you're banned, then the First Amendment applies because IT IS THE US GOVERNMENT making the request, or demand. This is a simple concept and distinction, even if 'civics' experts don't seem to understand it.. Or they do understand it, but intentionally attempt to mislead by deliberate misinformation.
It's also not uniquely a US problem. Way back, before RIPA even became law there were consultations between law enforcement, the ICO (Information Commissioners Office) and industry. We don't have the same 'Free Speech' rules in the UK, but we do have laws. So a lil problem. ISPs are told to take down illegal content, or face legal iability. ISPs may be told to provide subscriber information, or be punished. Subsriber's personal information is protected in law, so if the request wasn't valid, the ICO may prosecute the ISP. The subscriber could also bring a civil case against the ISP. Fun times!
So that ultimately resulted in a SPOC (Single Point Of Contact) system between entities entitled to make requests, and indsustry, who could train their SPOCs in the legal stuff. And that works, mostly.
In this case, it's more like the someone from Conservative or Labour party HQ demanding content or personal information and industry (ie Twitter) saying ;'OK!' and obeying orders.. Despite those requests being unlawful.
So it's a huge mess, especially as it's been allowed to spiral out of control and become blatantly political. Musk's exposed these issues, the litigation has only just started, and may or may not end up at the Supreme Court. And there may be more clarity around what 'Free Speech' means on the Internet, and when it's censorship for political advantage. Or even financial advantage.
Once 'society'', legislators and the courts have waded through that mess, then Musk, Zuckerburg etc have a better chance of implementing a fair and legal moderation system. Authoritarian/fascist people will no doubt whine because they can't silence people they don't like.
"..then the First Amendment applies because IT IS THE US GOVERNMENT making the request, or demand.
The 1st amendment applies, but opposite to the way you say. It prevents the FBI from demanding this. It is the opposite of your statement.
The entire succinct point of the 1st amendment is that the government has no legal authority to suppress free speech. Congress is prohibited from such actions. Nor can it compel others to act on their behalf. The FBI can ask for anything it likes, and I or Twitter, can tell them to go jump in a lake, and the FBI would have no legal redress to compel me to comply. Beautiful. They, and the entire US GOV'T, are powerless in this respect.
1st: "Congress...shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press....",
or the succinct full amendment:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Read much Alice?
The entire succinct point of the 1st amendment is that the government has no legal authority to suppress free speech.
Slowly, you seem to be getting there. So when (or if) it does, that's....?
Also, thought for the day. Perhaps not for you, because it requires functional neurons. But advertising, Twitter/Big Tech, and the silence of the MSM. So there's a thing called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. Like the Inflation Reduction Act, it does the opposite, but Biden's long supported the IRA. The Dems are currently trying to ram this through Congress by embedding journalism into the National Defence Authorization Act. I guess propaganda and psyops are part of a National Defence strategy, but if the Dems succeed, this will allow the MSM to do 'collective bargaining' with Big Tech so the MSM can extort money. Slightly odd given the way Biden's just handled the US rail unions, but the Dems desperately need the media onside. If it passes, the MSM gets a new revenue stream to make up for it's declining sales. Facebook's said if it passes, it'll just stop providing news. Maybe it'll even ToS this lot's members-
https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/
Our members represent today’s most trusted and compelling news and media brands whose job it is to keep the world informed.
At least they have a sense of humor. But they don't do irony-
https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/statement-meta-threatens-to-remove-news-from-facebook-if-jcpa-is-passed/
Facebook’s threat to take down news is undemocratic and unbecoming.
I guess when Twitter took down the NYP, it was democratic. Or maybe the NYP isn't a union member. But it may explain why the MSM is being sooo nice and helpful to the Dems right now in the hope that the JCPA passes. As they say "The Australian law resulted in countless jobs for local journalists and $140 million to news outlets, which translates to billions in the U.S.
If it doesn't pass before the Republicans take control of Congress, it won't get that windfall. Then it may be less kind to the Dems and.. I dunno, report on some of the shady stuff they've been doing. It doesn't really explain why the MSM is determined to chase advertisers away from Twitter though, but then a lot of the MSM journalists aren't that smart.
"So in theory, moderation should be pretty simple. Is this comment legal? Yes/No."
Great theory, but it doesn't work in practice. What is legal? Where is legal? When is legal? A post legal in one jurisdiction might not be in another, whether a post is legal can change over time, and maybe a post cannot be actually determined to be legal until a court has ruled on it, years after the fact. So "legal" is not a useful determining factor in practice.
Twitter requires money to work, and that comes from advertisers. Much of the moderation effort is to keep the cash sources happy. Some is to keep the users happy so they stick around to see the ads. The rest is to keep the courts and governments happy so Twitter stays open, and in some cases, the execs out of jail.
And the Hunter Biden laptop story is so crazy, it is hard to believe. It was also from the New York Post, not the most reliable of outlets. Twitter deciding to reduce the story's presence on the site is relatable and presumably totally legal in the US. The government telling Twitter to remove it, or alternatively, forcing them to carry it, would be a 1st Amendment issue, but that apparently didn't happen.
Great theory, but it doesn't work in practice. What is legal? Where is legal? When is legal? A post legal in one jurisdiction might not be in another, whether a post is legal can change over time, and maybe a post cannot be actually determined to be legal until a court has ruled on it, years after the fact. So "legal" is not a useful determining factor in practice.
Sure, and is an issue at the moment. So the legality (or just accuracy) of stuff around Biden(s), Covid, Russia etc. Legal's potentially easier to implement. Countries have laws, residents in those countries (real, or corporate) are supposed to obey those laws. If those laws are unclear, most countries legal system have a method to kick it back to the legislators to fix the legislation. Then laws become rules, and rules are easier to implement in filters. CP I guess is an obvious example. Illegal (I think) everywhere, so if CP is detected, block it from everywhere. In the US, it may be legal to call Trump a Nazi. In Thailand, calling their King the same thing could get you in a lot of trouble. So implement country specific filters, as is currently done with various 'Great Firewalls'.
Twitter requires money to work, and that comes from advertisers. Much of the moderation effort is to keep the cash sources happy.
Allegedly. Or there's a lot of lobbying by unhappy, fascist authoritarians who want to make advertisers unhappy, in order to punish Musk for ruining their safe space. Which also gets a little bizarre when it includes people defending the recent Balenciaga saga. If that lobbying is from individuals, it's just another day in the great political divide and can be addressed in civil courts, if necessary. If it's the government saying what Twitter can or can't do, or publish, then it's a Free Speech problem.
Musk's more immediate problem is simply making sure adverts are relevant. More often than not, they aren't, which means ad spend is being wasted placing ads next to content viewed by eyeballs that are never going to engage. That's probably easier to fix by just giving ad buyers more control over where there ads are placed. So Balenciaga may not want their bondage bears placed adjacent to say, firearms content, but gun shops and outdoors suppliers might. The government may also want to spend some money telling people not to lie on firearms applications, or dump pistols in rubbish bins near schools.
The government telling Twitter to remove it, or alternatively, forcing them to carry it, would be a 1st Amendment issue, but that apparently didn't happen.
Or it did, but hasn't gone through the legal system yet. Or much of the MSM because they've been studiously ignoring it. At least now, people on Twitter can discuss it, with less fear of being 'de-platformed'.
"The government telling Twitter to remove it, or alternatively, forcing them to carry it, would be a 1st Amendment issue, but that apparently didn't happen."
That part is what people are worried about. If agencies of the government did contact the leaders of social media companies to have reports or commentary about Hunter quashed, that could be a first amendment issue or it could be coercion depending on the details.
Pretty much everything you wrote is completely wrong.
How long has Telsa's FSD been "another 6 months" away now? He also doesn't have a shedload of cash. On paper he may be worth a lot of money, but he's massively overleveraged. Like around 80% of his entire net worth is collateral as part of some kind of loan. He even took the impressively risky move of using some of his Tesla stock as collateral to buy more Tesla stock. Then he went and spent $44bn he didn't really have to buy Twitter and has turned that into a raging inferno that is burning what little Tesla stock he hasn't put up as collateral for anything else.
Twitler's singular talent is he's a con man. He can talk a good game and convince investors to give him money. He isn't even particularly good at recognizing talent a la Steve Jobs. Telsa succeeds largely because for a long time it was the only real game in town if you wanted an EV, but that's going to change very quickly. Twitler also routinely ignores laws, like when he reopened the Tesla plant in Fremont despite a county order to keep it closed at the height of the pandemic. He told people if they didn't feel safe coming back they could stay home without repercussion, but when the entire workforce didn't immediately flock to the factory to risk their lives for a meager paycheck, he started firing people anyway. There have long been very credible reports of Tesla trying to deny injured workers proper healthcare at that Fremont facility, and lately there's been a stream of lawsuits alleging racial harassment, sexual harassment, and even minor sexual assault. So far, Twitler hasn't even so much as issued a single public statement about them.
All the people he fired at Twitter was done in violation of the law. For example, in California when you fire someone, you are legally required to give them all of their wages (including vacation time) at the time you tell them they're fired. Penalties for this are the person's daily rate, every day, for up to 30-days, for each employee. A number of employees fired were out on maternity leave, where it is against US federal law to fire them. There are reports that Twitter has stopped paying people who were put on gardening leave in the first wave (a hamfisted effort to get around the WARN Act) and their company matching 401(k) contributions have stopped.
You could easily fill a book with similar examples, just look at all the fantastical claims made by Boring Co and compare it to the results of the few projects it has completed. Twitler is one modest sized margin call away from financial ruin. He owes a lot of money to the Saudi's who aren't above carrying out extrajudicial killings of people (RIP Mr. Khashoggi). Tesla is going to be facing increasing competition as the other major auto makers enter the EV market in a serious way. SpaceX succeeds largely because Twitler was forced to put an adult in charge after he decided it was a good idea to go on camera and be filmed possessing and consuming a schedule 1 drug in the US. I'm not even going to get into the right-wing conspiracy nonsense because people who buy into that won't let silly things like facts get in the way of a good narrative.
You have to remember that he "knows more about manufacturing than anyone else alive"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwWrOzzwWQw
so either Musk doesn't agree with you or he is in the middle of re-coding Twitter from the ground up, to be released next Monday[1].
[1] timescales may be changed without prior notice
"Plus he still has a shedload of cash he can throw at developers to build the messaging app of his dreams. "
Does he? Elon has been cash poor quite a lot even when his net worth was more than it is now. SpaceX may be awash in red ink from all of the spending on Starship and Starlink and might need a cash infusion to get over some future humps. The Boring company is doing some work, but since it's private, who knows if revenue is covering the bills. Neuralink is definitely in startup mode and in a very expensive field. With so many fires to keep fed, how much can Elon allocate to a social media platform that hasn't shown much of a profit over its lifetime?
Back in 1995, Musk coded a city guide website by himself in overnight sessions, at least as he tells it (Wayback Machine link, may be slow). My gut says that experience might not be helpful at Twitter scales 27 years later, but I wouldn't bet $44bn on my gut.
I had to stop buying irony meters. Didn't matter if it was ruggidized military or industrial grade, Twitler would just immediately peg it and burn the thing out!
But in a way, this reminds me of a book I read. In it there's a character that's raised to be an assassin pretty much from birth. As part of their training, they are taught to withstand pretty much any level of pain that may result from torture if captured. So, when the bad guy of the story is captured by this person and needs to get away, they attack them with pleasure. At most we are generally only accustomed to the occasional and brief bit of schadenfreude. We're not really equipped to deal with it on a near constant basis like with Twitler and it overwhelms our senses.
If a journalist was interested...
It would be interesting to analyse how many engineers who've stayed at Twitter through the recent chaos are on H1B Visas. Though it's not explicitly stated in the various reports, it's implied it's a high proportion of the engineering work force.
That raises the question of whether Musk's "hardcore" ultimatum - Work all hours, twice as hard or be fired - constitutes a form of modern slavery for workers that essentially rely on Twitter's sponsorship to remain in the country.
(Posted anonymously because... can of worms)
Perhaps the "Journalists" at this very publication would be more interested in investigating collusion between Big Tech, the government and the media? You know "biting the hand" which used to be on the masthead. Isn't that the REAL story, and far more interesting that what Musk is doing to Twitter?
No. There is no "there" there. Not that you'll let a pesky thing like facts get in the way of a good narrative, but just as one example: Multiple statistical analyses of Twitter enforcement actions show that liberals are affected far more often than conservatives. I have my ideas on why, but it doesn't really matter. There is no conspiracy. Try taking off the tinfoil hat and getting a little sun and fresh air for a change.
Bright as a button.
"Papa always said I was bright as a button, so Mama always called me Button-Bright," announced the boy. ...The Scarecrow looked thoughtful.
"Your papa may have been right," he observed; "but there are many kinds of buttons, you see. There are silver and gold buttons, which are highly polished and glitter brightly. There are pearl and rubber buttons, and other kinds, with surfaces more or less bright. But there is still another sort of button which is covered with dull cloth, and that must be the sort your papa meant when he said you were bright as a button. Don't you think so?"
"Don't know," said Button-Bright.
H1B Visas are already a kind of corporate slavery. You can only work for that one employer, unless you can find someone else who will go to the hassle and expense of sponsoring you. They can remove their sponsorship at any time, so don't go getting ideas about expecting to be treated like a human being. And, despite the law requiring they pay you the same as they would a US citizen, you'll get paid significantly less.
I'm sure people have their reasons for taking these jobs, but it just doesn't seem worth it IMO. If you have highly marketable skills, surely you can find a good job in your home country, or maybe somewhere that treats workers a little better than the US.
Still, this would be the sort of thing to suggest to someone like Sen. Elizabeth Warren's staff to look into. Not sure if her committee assignments would really give her the ability to directly oversee such a thing, but she could certainly get in front of TV cameras and start applying some pressure by raising the issue.
H1B Visas are already a kind of corporate slavery
Yes, but when they came over to work for Twitter they went to work for a company well regarded in Silicon Valley as being a fun place to work, and had an idea what they were getting into as far as hours, etc.
Now Musk shows up, fires most of the people, changes the culture 180 degrees into a chain gang with long enforced hours, no fun allowed, and no choice but to go along or be sent back home with their dreams of eventual US citizenship left in ashes.
Musk is clearly taking advantage of that situation, he knows most of them have no choice but to go along with whatever terrible work conditions he imposes on them.
"And, despite the law requiring they pay you the same as they would a US citizen, you'll get paid significantly less."
There can be a big difference between your job title and the pay that is expected for that post and what you might actually be assigned to do. The assignments being something usually done by people several pay grades senior.
Good article but I suspect what will do Twitter in won't be technical, it will be financial. He's found an unprofitable company and decided the solution is to slash costs, but by doing so he's slashed revenue too. Advertisers don't want to be associated with hate speech, but it's categorically going to happen (see Private Eye's "Malgorithms" for inspiration) and when it does it will be publicised, widely. You'll be left with people punting cryptocurrencies and other unsavouries, revenue will collapse and that will be the end. A whimper, not a bang.
There is a clear correlation between staff costs and revenue, but it's not a direct link. Somehow he seems to have failed to notice it.
As an aside, I would love to be a fly on the wall the next time Elon approaches a bank for a loan...
Twitter's product isn't technology, it's a huge, volatile, worldwide community that the company has been desperately trying to keep from flipping out and falling apart for years, like someone trying to balance a broom handle in the palm of their hand. Elon doesn't seem to have grasped that - he may not understand technology very well but he really doesn't understand people and communities - and everything he does is basically poking at that precariously balanced stick. Whatever comes of it, Twitter will look very, very, different afterwards, if it exists at all.
But one thing that I think Musk fails to consider is that popularity IS a technical problem. His Tesla consulting engineers may not have been impressed with Twitter's code, and Musk himself appears to be focused on features like adding video, changing search, and prioritization. But much of the challenge at Twitter isn't just adding features and tweaking UI. It's keeping the system robust enough to handle millions of people making billions of Tweets. Twitter is still relatively simple because it's freaking big. Big and simple with a good support staff allows them to have very good uptime. Big and complex will make a lot more crashes and service outages. Add to this Musk's stated desire to cut back on the number of data centers that spread traffic and provide redundancy to cover if one goes down, and he's looking at more and more little problems adding up over time towards major outrages. Start monkeying with the code base, especially more large files when you start sharing long form video, and the system will not hold up. It is possible that he will hire enough people to cover the existing operations and roll out new features, but I will not hold my breath. He's lost the most experienced staff. Even if he went on a hiring spree, the people with institutional knowledge are seriously thinned out.
It achieved profitablity in 2018, then in 2020 it was unprofitable again for understandable reasons, then in 2021 it almost regained profitability. If Twitter had continued on this trajectory then it would have been profitable again this year.
Of course, it wouldn't have been profitable enough, because Musk bought it for a crazy amount of money which will forevermore be an albatross around its neck. The figures just don't add up, even before taking into account scaring off advertisers and crashing in and setting fire to everything so he could install a toxic workplace like he does everywhere else.
That is all true. See article in the Guardian today on Neuralink where he's also been pushing staff to cut corners, with predictable results
Your albatross point is true, the only bit that surprises me is that as far as I can tell, it really is $30bn of his own money he's staked - normally if you're going to destroy a company after buying it, you gear up the company debt to pay for it (see eg this great writeup of what happened at Maplin).
What you have to do here is start with the fact that Musk is autistic; what in former times would be termed Asperger's Syndrome (not now, political correctness). That means that he isn't anywhere near as hard-wired to be social as most folks are, and in particular he won't perceive social hierarchies very well. The platform Twitter will actually be rather boring to him; it's a billboard and that's about it.
What he does understand is mechanical systems, and he thinks other people will build mechanical systems including software constructs as he would design and build them. So, he would assume that the basic structure is bombproof, basically runs its self without human intervention at all. He would then further assume that the other components of Twitter would act like add-on modules, each with hooks into the basic sub-system and each more or less independent of each other.
I think that whilst about 99% of the substructure of Twitter is automated, there will still be 1% that needs rare human intervention. Lose those engineers, who will or should be trying to automate out these rare but repeated error states, and you start building up a technical debt over time.
Then there's the fact that Musk presumably does not fully understand all of how Twitter runs. It is an advertising company that uses humans and their social status-seeking thing to hook in eyes to wave adverts at. To do this you need to have slightly controversial content that isn't too offensive or nasty, but is dodgy enough to pull in the punters.
That's another huge part of the workforce's jobs, and one that you need native speakers of each local language to get done. For instance, in UK English a bumbag is a small bag that sits on your waistline. In American English, that's mildly offensive and the US term, fannypack, is amusingly rude in the UK. Indian workers aren't going to spot things like that, and H1B workers are all Musk has left now.
There will be technical issues. Since they still run a lot of on prem kit, they need people to handle the low end stuff. Certificate and domain name renewals, DNS management, network management, SECURITY!, hardware monitoring, storage monitoring. You might have a hardcore team of gun devs, but do you really want them wasting their time doing password resets, cert renewals, making routing changes and managing DNS? They won't want to do it, they won't be as good at it as somebody who does it full time and they should be doing their day job. Do you want to pay someone 6 figures to run around swapping failed disks?
You also cannot, under any circumstances let the devs near security.
Even if you have all the skills required, you can't run on long hours & short staff permanently. People get sick, want to leave, get pregnant, go on holiday, drop dead. You need to be able to cover them. Also, when shit does hit the fan, do you really want people who have been working constant 80 hour weeks pulled out of bed to try get to the bottom of an issue? When this happens you will want a full team of people who know all the dependencies who can talk through an issue before planning the resolution, not one tired guy who thinks he knows how it all hangs together making on the fly changes.
Interestingly, the first thing I saw this morning when I opened Twitter this morning was somebody asking "Is it down?", with plenty of responses saying that they were seeing errors. The rot could be starting to set in.
...how about we just wait and see?
Give it six months, or even better twelve, and see what the landscape looks like then? What's the point of all the catastrophising and doom-mongering? Does it make you feel better? Do you, perhaps, have some sort of emotional investment in Twitter that has been somehow trodden on by Musk? Do you, in short, really care?
I don't. I'm watching it with interest, and perhaps ironically, I'm using Twitter quite a lot more than I did previously (but from a very, very low starting point). Will it work, or will it collapse? I have no opinion. I can wait, because I am an adult.
GJC
That's a very reasonable take - a lot of people are heavily invested in the future of Twitter, either emotionally or politically, and it's colouring their crystal ball gazing quite heavily. Musk is divisive, and for many who have decided on which side of the fence they sit, there's a strong desire to be proven right.
It goes further than that. Musk's behaviour is stereotypical of quite a large swathe of US tech leaders, and that culture has spread over the years. For those that don't believe it's a very good way of running a company (for various values of good - social, financial, technical, political), this very public test of that sort of management style could have a huge impact on many other companies.
Finally of course, there's the inherent belief that "this company couldn't survive without me", and we now have some very experienced and talented engineers discovering that (if they've done their jobs well!), actually a company can survive a surprising length of time without their input.
And you hinted at at the end, that's only because they've spent the past 5-10 years making it resilient in the first place. It doesn't mean they weren't needed or won't be needed in the future should Twitter expand.
Our software couldn't last a month without us going in and fixing stuff, but that's what happens when you have the luxury of selling B2B software - lock down the requirements which don't include resilience and make the software deal with just those requirements - it's how the company gets repeat contacts.
I'm just watching it from a distance and wait.
Whatever you want to say about Musk, he's not stupid. Yes, in order to run a social network you first have to understand what the word "social" means (a challenge he shares with his unTruth buddy Trump), but I am not certain we see the whole picture just yet.
I suspect it'll be kept alive until 2024 by hook or by crook to manipulate the US election after which it will probably be abandoned.
(yes, I know this sounds like a conspiracy theory - actually, it basically is - but it's IMHO about the only logical explanation that avoids the ego theory, which is equally feasible but already covered ad infinitum)
Whatever you want to say about Musk, he's not stupid
What's your evidence for that? Because he's rich?
He has made stupid decision after stupid decision over the last few years, starting with his stoner tweet about "funding secured" to making a no contingency offer to buy Twitter when he wasn't even bidding against anyone else, to pretty much everything has he done since taking it over. The longer this keeps on the more I wonder if he has some sort of neurodegenerative disease or undiagnosed/secretly diagnosed mental illness.
The evidence for "he's stupid" is a lot stronger than the evidence for the contra case.
What's your evidence for that? Because he's rich?
No, because I know people who are far more stupid (I've dealt with a lot of politicians :) ). He can at least string a sentence together and in general offer reasonably coherent statements. Granted, it's usually utter BS and lacking fundamentals, but at least it hangs together so there IS somewhere in his nuggins that occasionally seems to work. It's more relative - stupidity isn't a binary value..
Do you, perhaps, have some sort of emotional investment in Twitter that has been somehow trodden on by Musk?
I think a lot of journalists have both a financial and emotional interest in Twitter. It's become a pretty important place for them to get easy quotes for stories.
But it's also become a research tool. For example I came to Twitter to follow the war in Ukraine. The media have got rid of most of their knowledgeable defence correspondents - and a lot of the coverage was poor, superficial or both. Now on Twitter you can find an awful lot of the same, and even more deliberate misinformation as well as plain wishful thinking.
But lots of niche communities have found Twitter a useful way to communicate. Like professional military analysts. And amateur ones too. Some of whom are extremely high quality. Find a few of the right people to follow and suddenly you start to see what they're looking at, then you can explore that and mine it for useful info too. Pretty soon you can be following a lot of people who post a couple of interesting things a day that you might not otherwise have come across.
If everyone just moves to something like Mastodon, I presume it's no huge problem. If those communities fragment, then you've lost access to a very useful research tool. If you've also built up emotional attachments to some of those communities as well - then you're going to be even more annoyed.
A bit like the Millennium Dome got continuously terrible press because on New Year's Eve, when they launched it, they invited al the media editors along and then stranded them on broken trains for an hour or two. It can't have been that bad, as it was the biggest single tourist attraction for the year, and got lots of repeat visitors - but never got positive coverage in the press after that.
@I ain't Spartacus
A lot of the IT security community already seem more active on Mastodon than Twitter as I'm seeing a lot more discussion threads linking to Mastodon posts rather than Twitter posts in the security related mail outs I receive (though obviously could be bias in that people active in the security areas I am interested in have moved to Mastodon but people in other areas have not)
Have you seen this? A curated list of curated lists of people (many of whom Twitter refugees) who are experts in certain fields, grouped by their discipline. From Air pollution science to Neuroscience, from Theology to Economics, from Astronomy to Law.
https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon
It appears that entire disciplines that were just happily interacting among themselves in their near-private corner of Twitter have decided that enough is enough and have upped sticks en masse. A discipline that I'm interested in (economics) has a weekly update post that goes round with all the new people in the field that have come to Mastodon this week. Look at hashtags such as #Histodon where all the historians coalesce around or the confusingly named #EconTwitter where all the economists that used to hang around on Twitter can now be found.
In actual accounts we're talking about less than 100,000 people but if you look at the quality. I bet that Twitter lost the majority of Nobel laureates that used to be on Twitter to Mastodon.
Imagine you see someone make a hostile takeover of a derelict sky scraper and you see regular news videos of him throwing hand grenades at the supports. You could wait to see what will happen but most people can make a fairly accurate guess. If the buyer with the hand grenades is not particularly popular then it is not doom and gloom but a fun spectator sport - with a little guilt because of the consequences for the homeless taking shelter in the attic and the few remaining neighbours who did not flee months ago.
Yeah, I'm not sure why so many articles about Twitter are popping up. Musk bought it, he's making some changes, OK, whatever.
I don't think they're as dramatic as the news cycles want to point out, it's being sensationalised in to something its not. He's also doing a lot of good, I read there's been a large purge of CSAM, which is nothing but laudible.
I don't have a Twitter account anyway, so it's not something I'm invested in.
Getting rid of half of the workforce, bullying those who remain, alienating the advertisers who pay money, and basically ignoring the rules about content moderation because that's a pain in the arse . . . is *not* dramatic?
He could, after blowing a ridiculous sum of money, have moved in as a silent director until he got up to speed with how the whole operation worked, to then look to ways to improve/streamline/etc.
But no. He marched in, tossed the pram, and is now hoping that the toys will remain levitating in the air and not succumb to gravity.
I don't use Twitter so zero fucks given, but I can't help but think that causing users, advertisers, and employees to run away screaming is only a good management style if you're an omnipotent being on a power trip. Well, half of that statement is correct, I guess...
When Steve Jobs regained control of Apple in 1997, the first thing he did was to fire over 4,000 people, about the same number Musk fired. OK, probably a smaller percentage, but no doubt exactly the same method - firing whole departments he saw as surplus.
I don't recall anything but praise in that case.
GJC
If a surgeon removes a gangrenous limb, and a mad man hack away some vital organs away, just because the removed tissue weighs the same does not make the procedures equivalent.
When Jobs returned to Apple he ended the bleeding, buy killing the OS/HW licensing and Newton and presumably eliminated the departments and people it employed. He also brought in NeXT and its engineers, so presumably lots of duplication there as well. By the time he departed he had turned what was a $4B company into the world most valuable corporation, with more cash than most countries GDP.
Jobs had detailed knowledge of Apple, the product, their market and the industry. He did not pay a penny to become the CEO, added no debt to the company, and took a $1 salary.
Musk, knowing nothing about the inner workings of Twitter, took a bandsaw to vital, core departments, engineering, compliance and who know what else cutting employment by half, and publicly demonstrated he had no clue what he was doing with the $44B toy he just bought.
So not the same.
I suppose Twitter is getting so much attention because everyone basically can't look away from what seems to be a train wreck in progress....thats captivating content, escpecially when the main protagonist is an extremely devisive character with extreme views and behaviour. Its not really suprising - in fact, that may be the main motivation for it all - "look at me!!".....
'What's the point of all the catastrophising and doom-mongering? Does it make you feel better?'
Yes, it makes me feel much better. It's top notch schadenfreude. It's looking like real time, in depth, detailed coverage of a smug Genius Billionaire getting his arse handed to him, and that practically never happens. And it's totally free!
If Twitter is still around in 6 months, never mind 12, I will be dumbfounded. Normally I'd be with you, and I think even the most dire predictions for before Twitler took the reigns was that it'd take him 1-2 years to drive the company into the ground. No one ever imagined that he'd snatch defeat from the jaws of victory within a month.
At the rate things are going, Twitter probably won't last into the new year. But it also doesn't take a business genius to figure out that you can't just walk in and fire half the staff of a company with no real plan and still make things viable. He also clearly hasn't figured out that the reason advertisers are leaving in droves is the massive spike in hate speech since he took over. He has somehow managed to exceed everyone's wildest expectations when it comes to business damaging blunders so far and hasn't shown any signs of slowing down.
I think Twitter will still be around in a year's time from now. But it will have pulled out of Europe by Summer 2023 when the security and safety audit of the company under the Digital Services Act is due. This is a sobering thread.
There's no way the company can shape up quick enough (or afford the many thousands in head count increase that's required) to be ready to make it through an encounter with the law. The fines will be immense and Elon will just pull the company out of Europe to prevent it. And then he'll complain that the advertisers don't want to advertise on Twitter any more.
If the UK passes its Online Safety Bill some time next year then Twitter will be in for another treat. Watch the regulatory space.
That's yet to be seen.
We know for a fact what Twitter did during the last election - going as far as blocking private messages that were spreading a true story that was harmful to Twitter's preferred candidate.
People should be in prison for that. There probably isn't a crime on the books to cover it, but there should be.
You're saying that Musk buying Twitter is bad because he *might* do things as bad as the old owners did...
The report actually said that they responded to requests from both sides of the political divide (the outrage bus conveniently ignores this detail) - but that the higher proportion of Democrat-leaning employees (no surprise in a tech company) tended to be more supportive of requests from their preferred party.
Why this should be a surprise to anyone, or why anyone believes a company has any obligation to be neutral in the highly partisan American media environment is beyond me.
It's like Oprah buying Fox News and complaining it has a right-wing bias.
Additionally, Musk distracts everyone with this *explosive* revelation just at the point where the latest (dire) financial numbers come out - and then goes on to personally select 'favourites' to ban or unban without any oversight at all. How are all the people who are being loudly outraged about Twitters' past political interference strangely silent whilst Musk picks and chooses who he wants on the site? And no - he is not being a 'free speech absolutist', whatever he may claim (and however many accounts pointing this out he might choose to remove from the site).
Why this should be a surprise to anyone, or why anyone believes a company has any obligation to be neutral in the highly partisan American media environment is beyond me.
Probably because the US is based on this thing called the Constitution. Basically it's foundation, and sets out how the people and government are supposed to behave. At the top of the list is the right to free speech. That gets confused by a lot of people to mean we can't say anything people disagree with. Reality is it's about the way the government is not supposed to supress free speech. Companies can do what they want, within the laws of the land.
Some of those laws relate to how elections are conducted, and how election communications should be handled. That's the other issue because if a political party leans on the media to supress an embarrassing story, it might be election rigging.
US Constitution, First Amendment (AKA Constitution 101):
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Tell me where Twitter fits in there.
It is amazing how fucking stupid conservatives are. They don't even understand what the first amendment says when it is literally small enough to fit in a fortune cookie!
Besides, your orange Jesus said on Saturday he wanted to "terminate" the constitution, so why are you talking about it? Shouldn't you be making plans for storming the capitol again so he can burn the constitution and become emperor while all you nutjobs cheer?
Ultimately, regardless of exactly what happened, everyone of any decency had a moral imperative to ensure Trump and everything he stood for lost power. He was a danger to democracy..
Err.. no. The problem with democracy is that kind of thinking. Democracy means (or should mean) that if 51% of the eligible US voters choose to vote for Trump, then Trump gets elected. Some portion of the 49% may then complain about how the election was stolen, as they did when Trump beat Clinton.
As long as it's a fair election, then we, the people are supposed to accept the results. The real danger to democracy is when people think a candidate must be defeated at all costs, even if that means unfair elections.
This post has been deleted by its author
Only 46.1% of voters voted for Trump. 48.2% voted for Clinton. So... I really don't know what point you're trying to make.
That's pretty much the point Clinton made. She won. Or she lost because of Russia. Or the US Constitutional Republic isn't a simple democracy based on a simple majority. Instead, it has it's Electoral College system, which is an opportunity for gerrymandering and vote rigging in itself.
It could of course change to a majority system, but that would require a LOT of paperwork and a new Constitution.. Which may resolve some of these issues, or just create a shedload of new ones. But if the Constitution is being ignored by politicians, perhaps it's no longer fit for purpose and should be replaced. Of course if one party (or person) suggest this, it's immediately attacked, If the other party routinely violates it, it's ignored.
Even though Twitter in itself probably isn't that important, it and other 'big tech' manipulations do have far wider democratic implications. Kinda why the whole 'Free Speech' thing was placed at the top of the Constitution in the first place..
This post has been deleted by its author
A a conservative Republican myself, I fervently hope the leadership of the Republican party and the RNC takes a really long, hard, critical stare at how Trump's poor behavior has cost us elections that we should have easily won. He will most likely scuttle any remote chances we have of retaking the White House in 2024, whether that's because he ends up being the Republican candidate, or because he pulls a Ross Perot and drains votes away by going independent. He needs to follow Hillary into the Hole of Irrelevance and just STFU, but I don't think he's capable of that. So it's going to come down to the Republican leadership actually "leading" for a bit, and putting him in his place. Strategically and numerically he can't win the election, so if they give in and cater to him, well, then we're looking for a decent candidate after Biden's second term.
Urgh.
Everybody knew the rules at the outset. Everybody then campaigned based upon those rules.
That means spending time and money on swing states at the expense of states that either can't be won or can't be lost.
Clinton was just doing a Trump in pretending that the election was stolen.
If you change the rules, candidates will campaign differently. They will try to win more votes at the expense of states rather than the other way around.
In pretending that the US presidential vote is based on an overall majority, you are being intentionally dishonest.
Both sides know how votes are counted. Both sides therefore spend more time and money on swing states and don't spend time and money trying to win votes in states they either can't win or can't lose.
If the rules at the outset were different, both parties would campaign very differently.
You know this, right? You're just lying about being misinformed?
This post has been deleted by its author
The OP was implying that that is the case. I was merely questioning that assertion.
I just went with a simplified form of democracy, It's the least worst option. Even where it's a more majority-based decision, it still has it's opportunities for abuse. You may swing enough votes to land the top job, but they end up a lame duck because you didn't win enough constituencies to win a majority that can actually get stuff done. Kind of why most democracies have those checks and balances so we don't end up with tyrannies or dictatorships though.
(And seeing as the Constitution is in the news again. Perhaps Musk could organise a contest. Come up with a Constitution 2.0. Or more amusing would be getting Congress to do the same. The original didn't take that many people, was developed pretty quickly, and has stood the test of time. Mostly.)
1 thumb down.
Not from me. But you'll notice it happens any time you prod sacred cows with sharp sticks. Some subjects tend to be extremely divisive, especially when it challenges popular consensus. It's rather sad, and a depressing sign of the times that some areas have become so polarised, especially when that polarisation is often intentional, and a danger to democracy.
The problem isn't with that, but the preceding statement that defines anything I don't like as rigging elections. It's as if I said that your view would lead to someone dying and therefore is murder, and replied to any disagreement with "Isn't murder wrong anymore?" without actually doing anything to prove that it is murder.
Taking legal steps to attempt to convince people to vote the way you want isn't rigging elections. Even if those are extreme legal steps you wouldn't ordinarily take, they're still legal. Other things are illegal under election law. The difference is important. Saying that something is rigging elections because you don't like it, then acting like everyone who disagrees with you is in favor of dictatorships, makes you sound like a troll.
Taking legal steps to attempt to convince people to vote the way you want isn't rigging elections.
Bit of a redundant statement there. If it's legal manipulation, then it's just BAU for politics, not election rigging. See also-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud#Disinformation
Similarly in the United States, right-wing political operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were indicted on several counts of bribery and election fraud in October 2020 regarding a voter disinformation scheme they undertook in the months prior to the November, 3 2020 general election
Which implies misinformation can be illegal, Not the best example as the specifics of that case were more akin to disenfranchising voters than simply lying to them, and they were prosecuted under this Code-
https://law.justia.com/codes/ohio/2019/title-29/chapter-2913/section-2913-05/
Which is the good'ol wire fraud catch-all rather than any election specific law. Which do exist, and I've been reading the DoJ version, and it's kinda boring. On the plus side, even if you do get convicted, the penalties don't appear that harsh for abusing democracy. Now I'm wondering if the White House tweeting about student loan forgiveness prior to the election, then dropping it immediately afterwards could also constitute wire fraud. I guess the DoJ would have to prove the Executive branch didn't know that it didn't have the legal powers to do this, even though Pelosi had already told them that would be Congress's resposibility.
Even if we charitably assume all of that is correct, how is firing the team that deals with content moderation and replacing them with an algorithm going to be an improvement? Surely you would expand, retrain or replace the team, not remove it entirely.
I don't see anyone claiming Twitter was perfect. I do see a lot of people claiming he's just made it worse, not better. Any unmoderated online forum turns into hate soup very quickly.
Christ - a common garden slug would be able to see that the apple twitter spat was Elon preemptively acting before Apple even suggested pulling twitter from the App Store.
Elon effectively fired the first shot and effectively brought the fight to Apple - its the equivalent of “you can think about trying to ban us but I will make your name mud; and I’ll bring to bear many millions of users against you”.
Question - why has EL reg seemly lost a percentage of IQ whenever it starts ranting about Elon and Twitter ??
OK, so suppose Twitter does fail. Who else will it take with it?
The dotcom bubble burst in the early 00's after a period when far too much money was squirted into companies with less than promising financial / business basics. And like many burst bubbles, it didn't take much to collapse the whole mess once the dominoes started to fall.
In the same way that during Covid much money was thrown at tech companies that looked promising, but have since lost a lot of their value as reality kicked back in.
Social is well over due a reality bubble burst.
That those companies aren't making anywhere enough to justify their shares prices, or indeed any future where there will, reminds me of the dot com bubble burst any how it all started.
But, Musk was dumb to buy Twitter, but not all he has done since is. Sacking the staff was needed at $4 million loss a day. It's just that Twiiter, like FB, have had been given blind spots not afforded to established companies.
It is do or die for Musk now. Social is a cruel mistresses and she does eat her own.
Looking at the availabile financials, Twitter was on course to break even, and perhaps make a small profit this year.
So if the $4 million/day losses figure Musk claimed is true, those losses are because of loan repayments and advertisers pulling the plug.
In other words, the loss is because Musk took over, loaded the company with debt and fired the staff.
...that Elon Musk has bought a white elephant - a seemingly stupid thing to do, unless he has some way of nurturing the company into a high profitability position very quickly (as otherwise, it'll be bankrupt unless Musk spends even more money on keeping it going).
And with potentially fewer active members and fewer advertisers, clearly it might just become another "MySpace", "Napster" or "Friendster" and just sink without trace, aside from Musk who no doubt will continue "broadcasting" to fewer and fewer interested parties, until like the Captain of the Titanic, Musk and his ship will sink into the depths of oblivion....and a niice tax-write-off for the IRS to deal with !
Nor will the Twitanic, but it was nice of Elon to provide comfy lifeboats to all crew who wanted to get off the ship early, because they knew it would end up going down like this. And the technical icebergs look so small and trivial from the deck, that Captain Musk can't see how big they are and what real damage they do below the waterline. Then there's the social problems to deal with on top of the technical ones. Having to apologise to Apple after he trash talked them, banning Kanye for posing a swastika after discovering some of the downsides to being a "free speech absolutist", along with huge Meh of the Hunter Biden Laptop Revelations, these are the tedious and non-fun things he now has to spend his time dealing with, and I bet he's not enjoying it at all and thoroughly regretting wasting his cash on what he thought would be non stop bigmouthed self-publicity with the world applauding his every move.
About those lifeboats... Turns out they're just leaky rubber dinghies made up to look like comfy lifeboats.
People haven't been getting paid, insurance has been cut off, 401k contributions have stopped...
https://twitter.com/akivamcohen/status/1598487532764798983?s=46&t=Gl0eEDxkLSygRUFjSd99SA
Properly functioning or not is not something that will hurt it unless there is direct competition which it’s not right now. As long as somehow functions most of the time Twitter’s users will bear it. So don’t expect Twitter demise on technical failures unless catastrophic and sustained for months.
So expect to have Twitter for decades, only time will tell if Twitter will fall out flavor in a few years like Tumblr, Flickr, Yahoo and many others did before becoming simply a ghost of what it once was and perduring multiple change of hands.
Assuming the more reasonable users and corporates want to be associated with it when the trolls move in, and various countries don't outright block access due to legal reasons arising from the lack of coherent moderation (I think we've seen enough examples of AI to know that AI won't cut it).
Twitter is done. If it's still around in a month, I'll be amazed.
The only hope Twitter has is if Twitler appoints a competent adult to run the company and just walks away completely. Of course that hope was pretty much dashed against the rocks when Twitler saddled the company with huge amounts of debt to feed his Twitter addiction and then gutted the staff. You've got threats coming from all sides. There's the massive debt payments of around $1bn/mo to make with advertisers fleeing and revenues dropping. There's the fact that there's no one left to fix a lot of the things that may go wrong, from the mundane of a drive in a RAID array failing, to the more serious of a fire at a data center or some kind of major data breach, and assuming Twitter manages to survive into the new year, there's regulatory storm clouds brewing in the EU because Twitler thinks that the laws don't apply to him. He grew up a wealthy white kid in Apartheid South Africa, and now is a wealthy white man in America where sadly that grants influence.
And what's worse for Twitler, is his misadventures at Twitter are likely going to impact his positions at Tesla and SapceX. He's turned himself into a walking radioactive cloud that affects everything within a good sized radius.
And what's worse for Twitler, is his misadventures at Twitter are likely going to impact his positions at Tesla and SapceX. He's turned himself into a walking radioactive cloud that affects everything within a good sized radius.
A lot of Tesla owners bought electric cars because they believe global warming is real and an electric car is better for the environment. Having its CEO take off his mask and reveal himself to be a hardcore Trumpnut has got to be a rude awakening for many of them. They aren't going to take their Tesla to the nearest car crusher, but when it comes time to buy a new electric car they will be glad there are a growing number of alternatives as they won't be repeat customers.
Alienating at least half your potential customer base is a pretty poor move for a CEO, but as CEO Tesla Musk has managed to do exactly that. The people who adore the 'new' Musk are overwhelmingly not in the market for electric cars. They'd rather buy a diesel pickup and 'roll coal' every time they pass a Prius with a Biden bumper sticker!
A lot of Tesla owners bought electric cars because they believe global warming is real and an electric car is better for the environment. Having its CEO take off his mask and reveal himself to be a hardcore Trumpnut has got to be a rude awakening for many of them. They aren't going to take their Tesla to the nearest car crusher, but when it comes time to buy a new electric car they will be glad there are a growing number of alternatives as they won't be repeat customers.
Yup. In some ways, it's rather strange. Musk was a darling of the left a short while ago. Buy a Tesla, save the planet. Buy SolarCity roof tiles and batteries, save the planet. Musk said Tesla doesn't need to spend anything on advertising because the media generally gushed over his every word and announcement. See also the hype around the Hypeloop. A lot of the MSM and reporters were happy to do free PR for the world's richest man.
Then along came Twitter, and everything changed.
So I'm curious what the wider impact will be, and if Musk's reality distortion field is failing. I agree that many 'right wing' people aren't likely to buy Teslas as a result of this shift. Following stereotypes, they're more likely to buy an electric pickup truck, and the Cybertruck isn't available, and the electric Hummer isn't affordable. Electric F150s are. So as you say, there's the potential double whammy of liberals deciding not to buy Tesla due to perceived politics, and increasing competition in the EV market. Or pretty much any market where Musk competes.
Then there's the wider implications of the Musk bubble bursting. He's both the world's richest man, and possibly the world's largest debtor, considering loans secured against his Tesla stock. Musk transfered billions in debt to Twitter, but that debt/loans have covenants attached. People are calling, or hoping for Twitter to collapse. If so, the usual trick is to declare Ch.11 and debt restructuring. Bond holders are more secure than shareholders, but bond debt usually gets converted to new shares, and existing shareholders are wiped out. If debt is secured against Tesla stock, there are the obvious implications, if Tesla's share price also takes a hit due to politics, or just margin calls. Most of Musk's other enterprises, like SpacX and Starlink are also heavily indebted, and also dependent on government pork. So if there's an inability to raise new debt, or there's less subsidies, the empire falls.
There's already been an announcement of an investigation into Neuralink's animal welfare practices given the number of primates it kills. Animal experimentation is (rightly) unpopular amongst many liberals. If, as you say, Musk becomes radioactive, or just toxic, a Ch.11 for SpacX could probably be engineered fairly easily, and control of a strategic resource transferred to safer hands. Or there's just the general problem of SpacX's cash burn rate, and a need to get Starlink V2 satellites launched, which have a dependency on Starship getting off the ground. I think it was around this time last year that Musk sent a memo to SpacX employees saying it was critical to get that working to avoid bankruptcy.
Presumably some of it went into the pockets of the people who built Twitter in the first place, but no longer have to slave for it.
Those people know what worked and what didn't.
When the Titanic has sunk, those people can Build Back Better.
I am surprised not to have seen this point of view expressed already.
Many a thing you know you’d like to tell him
Many a thing he ought to understand
But how do you make him stay
And listen to all you say
Can we just ship Elon over to Austria and make him sing whilst walking across the Alps into Switzerland?
At the very least, can't make things any worse - except for the jokes, of course. "The Sound of Musk", does that work? "When the car sparks, when the bore stops, when I'm tweeting bad, I simply remember my Falcon in space, then I don't seem so mad".
Musk seems to have made the same mistake made by a lot of new owners and managers. They looks at a business and make a couple of assumptions:
1. This business would make a profit if only we could carve chunks out of the expenditure
2. This business would make a profit if we charged more (or in this case just charged) for services
The problems with these assumptions are many but they usually boil down to one for each of those two assumptions
1. Sometimes the expenditure you have is what it takes to run the company. You can't halve your headcount and then maintain service by expecting your staff to work twice as hard or for twice as long, that would cost money.
2. Sometimes your customers are already paying as much as they are willing to do for the services you offer. Increase your prices (or start charging) and customers will find they can do just fine without your services
Add to this that any change to services is always going to cost you customers at least in the short term. The trick to offsetting that is to find new customers.
In the case of twitter the revenue up to now has come from advertisers. In other words the advertisers are the customers, the users are part of the product. Musk's idea of increasing revenue by charging for verification ticks shows that he fundamentally misunderstood this aspect of the business. In an ad funded business what you are doing is selling the user's attention to the advertisers. Charging the users to use the service as well isn't impossible (subscription based TV which also has advertising is a thing) but changing from a previously free model to a paid model is the challenge.
The old fashioned way to make your business profitable in this case would be more ad revenue, but Musk seems to have almost uniquely embarked on a course of action which is alienating existing advertisers without attracting new ones.
Twitter only ever made sense as a listed company. It was losing a billion a year on revenue of $5 billion with no real growth plan beyond splashing cash in the hopes of catching lightning in a bottle for a second time. That was only possible because of speculative investing. The moment it delisted and lost the ability to raise capital on the thinly veiled scent of cow manure, it essentially lost all value. There’s no road to success or even profitability given the debt service on $13 billion that came with the acquisition.
Twitter is merely another web page run on commodity equipment, if the old team flees the miserable overlord and an outage develops, it’s not like a new team couldn’t easily take over. Or rip out everything they don’t understand and replace it with something they do understand.
I speak from the perspective of watching idiots like Donald Trump and Mike Lindell saying they’d make their own social network platforms, since they were booted off Twitter, and yup they both succeeded.
Twitter is a fundamentally simple platform that is noteworthy only because of the size of its user base. Other than that it’s really nothing but another BBS and I ran one of those for years. Ain’t nothing.
If Mike Lindell can do it, musk can too.
can we all go back to MySpace? I miss pages with crappy tiled background graphics and 75 DNS lookups from 75 different domains for each page refresh. Ah, the good old days.
But more seriously, have any moderate to large players started positioning themselves as replacements for Twitter? Seems like this would be the ideal time. I've head a fair bit about Mastodon, but I thought that was more a framework, like Drupal or Wordpress, than an actual social gathering place.
On a tangent from all out the above, is anybody else looking at this
https://regmedia.co.uk/2022/11/18/shutterstock_musktwitter.jpg?x=302&y=151&crop=1
& thinking this?
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS8Qjc_1IWTXERVazLA8V5u7JpMDpycSghNvg&usqp=CAU
Icon - Getting my white piped black blazer, with a number 6 badge.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
