>Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people.
I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars.
It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.
>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore".
It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor.
Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website.
Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.
Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue
> Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.
Bingo. Hard-core engineering has been the lynchpin of Tesla and SpaceX's success -- they literally won via designing and manufacturing superior physical things.
It makes sense that EM would blunder by attempting to reproduce that type of success at Twitter. And it will be a blunder, unless: (a) he plans to build one or more new products (or drastically change the nature of the existing product), and (b) those new or drastically changed products will somehow "win" in a big way that Twitter isn't winning now.
But at least to me, (a) doesn't seem likely and (b) seems even less likely.
(a) seems very likely to me. Didn't he already speak about making Twitter a "super-app"? super-apps are a bit new to the American audience but in China / India they are surprisingly commonplace.
I won't be surprised if he churns through a bunch of different ideas: Subscriptions, Deals with news companies, short form videos + creator tools, different kinds of ad experiences, the edit button, better spam filtering etc.
There's a lot of potential things Twitter could be doing if they didn't limit themselves to their core product.
I don't think (b) is unlikely. Their current product is already highly valuable. You don't need their short form video product to succeed in a way TikTok did but there's enough of an audience to capture there to improve the company's valuation.
Maybe I'm living in a filter bubble, but I think it's going to be hard to build a "super app" that relies on the presence and active participation of reputable brands--publishers, if it's a news platform; businesses, if it's a b2c communications platform--when those brands are currently freaked out by the seemingly erratic behavior of the new CEO.
Even if Musk somehow learns to stop live-tweeting his trial-by-fire, the damage might be done: natural iterations on business plans and features will play into a by now near-universal stereotype of Musk as some sort of shoot-from-the-hip madman, which will deter business partners from committing.
(Like, if I'm Fox News or the NY Times, do I want to commit to publish on Musk's new platform when tomorrow he might get stoned and decide to offer hosting to the Daily Stormer? Or, if I'm Bank of America, do I want to commit to consumer payments when tomorrow Musk might pivot his "super app" to offering video shorts instead?)
Again, maybe I'm living in a bubble, but Musk's reputation seems like a huge impediment to, like, doing this. At all. Ever.
He has. But doesn’t the concept of a super app fly in direct opposition with some of his stated goals and issues regarding Twitter? He has ranted about bloat, both in terms of features, engineering, and employment at Twitter, and all his seemingly disastrous moves since taking over have been aimed at reducing bloat. And yet creating a “super app” sounds like it will be adding back in bloat orders of magnitude larger than whatever currently exists at Twitter.
I’m not sure anything Elon says about the current or future state of Twitter has any credibility. It seems like the company is now being directed via stream of consciousness at this point.
Good point you raise. Without broaching speculative argument as to the general state of Mr Musk’s consciousness-stream:
Giant, bloated organizations (and projects, and other things) can often be helped by reduced-size, highly-directed streams of consciousness suddenly making unilateral changes to them.
One way to term it— and there are many— is crisis restructuring. Whether Twitter was actually in crisis, and whether the unilateral stream of consciousness doing the restructuring is ”divinely inspired,” remains to be seen.
Twitter's cost was based on its market value. Expanding the portfolio, however, isn't as expensive, especially not when your new boss has all the money. That combined with its pull factors is why some people bet on Twitter coming around eventually.
On the other hand, exactly that development towards super-apps makes it even more important that we push for decentralization.
Not to mention that the US is already reigned by mono- and oligopolies in many markets, it is also a privacy disaster.
Many nations, especially in Asia, have little awareness of the concept of privacy. and thus its consequences, so it isn't surprising such offers took off so swiftly there.
You are correct, he did mention (a) as his intent in buying Twitter. Makes me think that he acquired Twitter for the users and wants to introduce those super-app features ASAP.
That may be true for its fit and finish (panel alignments etc.), but the fact that they mastered vertical integration and supply chain management in less than 10 years is beyond amazing. Their powertrain (battery, motors, other hv components like charger etc) are first class and unparalleled in performance (and cost). We’ll see what Lucid will achieve in the next couple of years, their claimed (and validated) numbers such as range are very impressive, but for now, but Tesla has proven that it is a hardcore engineering company in a few important areas, there are others that need to catch up.
Tesla's manufacturing process engineering is unparalleled in the automotive space, but the final products are often buggy because when you reinvent manufacturing overnight and don't nail it 100% all people see are the bugs.
I personally don't like Teslas that much, I think they got a lot of things wrong, but the manufacturing process engineering really is leading the whole car industry by quite a ways.
Check out MunroLive's teardown videos on YouTube where they talk about the changes to part counts, castings, fasteners, and all the internal details that consumers don't notice.
Are you familiar with the innovation diffusion curve[0]? It is very normal for industry leaders to build buggy products, because early adopters value innovation more than perfection. That’s how the whole tech industry works.
Tesla may or may not succeed in appealing to the late majority and laggards, but if they don’t, the Toyota you buy in 15 years will still have benefitted from the industry changes Tesla is leading today.
What is Tesla doing in 2022 that every other car maker hasn't started doing? It seems like they're still building buggy products long after this excuse could work.
Well, its hard when you say things like "every other car maker". Other car makers are starting to do some of the same things, but sometimes these are things Tesla did first.
For example, both Lucid and Rivian use round cells for batteries. BMW is exploring the 4680 form factor. Most other manufacturers still do not use round cells.
Tesla is using large castings for major parts of the frame. I think Volvo is starting to do this? Its not entirely a new trend, but again, Tesla was the first in the auto industry to do it this way.
The way Tesla does the structural pack for the 4680 is unique as well at the moment.
Having said that, I think Tesla people overstate the customer significance of all of these things. The real impact is technically interesting, but isn't really making a big difference in the outcome of the vehicles.
There are other EVs that charge faster and are significantly cheaper too, now that Tesla keeps raising prices.
If you find yourself characterizing something as an "excuse", it's a pretty good sign that you're looking for confirmation of bias rather than new information to form an opinion about.
But sure, how about:
- Model years. Have you seen the 2022 Tesla Model 3? No, because it doesn't exist. Teslas evolve over time. Other manufacturers still have days where the next model year starts being produced and the cars are very different than the previous day.
- Greatly simplified cabin. I hate this, but I think it's the future.
- OTA software updates. Some other makers are doing small updates a bit, but nobody (let alone everybody) is doing what Tesla is here
>Teslas evolve over time. Other manufacturers still have days where the next model year starts being produced and the cars are very different than the previous day
People who like Tesla and people who hate it both seem prone to making declarations about how different it is that seem unfounded to me.
The auto industry underwent a long evolution to regimented model years, and they still make changes in between to this day. Framing a lack of model years as progress rather than regress by ~a half century seems arbitrary to me.
When cars are recalled, it isn't uncommon for the population to be defined as a range of serial numbers. The fact that recalls aren't always based on model years seems like pretty good evidence that changes are made in between, doesn't it?
I thought the exact same thing, there's really absolutely nothing special about Tesla anymore.
I appreciate the direction they pushed the industry towards, but I feel like the innovation has finished and I'd expect a lot of the problems to be ironed out.
Toyota on the other hand have produced a car which runs on hydrogen, it is in production and for sale in the USA right now. They also do hybrids and I'm sure if they wanted to, they'd do electric no problems.
American automotive manufacturing became hyper-conservative over time. A willingness to let (non-safety-critical (1)) bugs get to market with the tradeoff of making products you otherwise wouldn't is a market-distinguishing tradeoff.
(1) But my larger concern is that I can't say about Tesla that only non-safety-critical bugs are making it out the door, so I also won't buy one. Because unlike a buggy phone or buggy smart watch, a buggy car with safety-critical bugs can kill other people, so there's wisdom in disallowing it.
Which doubles the ironic nature because most of the Japanese cars sold in the US are built in the US, and many (most) of the "US Cars" that are sold in the US are built in Mexico and Canada.
Why... unions. Japanese Manufacturers have evaded the UAW problem, where Ford and GM have had to flee the nation to get out from under decades of sunk costs
It still absolutely rocks if acceleration speed is your most important metric (which I personally find quite compelling), but in pretty much every other aspect they're janky cars compared to similar vehicles in the same price range and even some cheaper ones. Very fun to drive though.
THIS. "Extremely powerful & fast, fun to drive, and the company making 'em is run by an alpha macho guy who also builds space rockets"...yeah, that has huge emotional appeal to a large number of well-to-do males - who would not want to be seen in a Nissan Leaf, Toyota Prius, etc.
Sounds more like cargo-culting boys rather than adult males... I've personally know noone who decides car buys based on this, and this counts also 2 tesla owners. Car sale tax discounts, free charging, plenty of charging spots were the actual reasons for those 2 (myself I am still happily on petrol for next decade at least, thank you)
That's interesting. I don't own a car and I'm not looking for one, but I still had the impression Tesla was leading on range. However, they're beaten at both price levels, potentially with a significant price discount.
Mercedes EQS 450+, 640km, €106,307
Tesla Model S Plaid, 540km, €140,995
Mercedes EQE 350+, 525km, € 79,850
Tesla Model 3 LR DM, 485km, € 60,995
BMW i4 eDrive40, 470km, € 60,630
VW ID.3 Pro S 5Seats 450km, € 43,720
There's a third issue besides price and range in the EV market right now. Wait time. e.g. that VW ID.3 has a wait time of over a year for delivery. That crosses it off my shopping list, unfortunately.
In Europe where I live - VW, BMW and Mercedes do not have a reliable system of recharging for longer trips. Why they are not working to create that is beyond me.
You don't seem to be across what's happening in Europe. All of the companies you mentioned are invested in Ionity which provides 350 kW chargers at over 400 locations:
Europe has standardized on CCS Type 2 Combo for charging. Any CCS EV can charge on any CCS charging network. Teslas can charge on Ionity, BMWs can charge on Tesla chargers, charging networks like FastNed, BP, GridServe, EnBW, Circle K and friends can charge all brands, etc.:
It is still not that great in the USA. In the Pacific Northwest, if I want to goto Spokane, I have to hope the the Electrify America charging stations in Ellensburg aren't down again. One point of failure doesn't make me feel very comfortable, especially since EA is so flaky (if Tesla opens up there supercharger network, I'll be the first to buy an adapter).
If I want to go down to John Day national monument in eastern Oregon, things are even worse. Things will get better (oh, and we want to do a trip to Anchorage someday...).
That is one of the best tests out there, IMO. I do wish they'd add their charge curve details to it somehow. Something like the estimated time to completely a 600 mile trip would be an interesting detail, as range isn't the only thing that matters.
Aren't all EV ranges measured based on the latest EU measurement standard? Which means cars are incredibly prepped for those tests, but the results are not made up and they are more or less comparable between models and brands.
make sure to researched tested vs claimed range, Teslas have good range but fall short from claimed range by large %, there are cars that end up having the same or better range like the Taycan even though the claimed range from Porsche is less! do your own research, correlation is not your coin, etc
I can't agree with that. They are certainly not janky compared to the Leaf or Bolt and up until fairly recently the 3 was price competitive with the Bolt.
Beyond that, comparisons get more complicated, but there are still perks to the 3/Y. For example, the Ioniq 5 and EV6 charge faster but have less real world range at highway speeds. In practice, this negates most of their charging advantage.
If you want the best EV sedan for road tripping in the US right now, there is nothing lower price and also better than the 3 LR.
Only if we look at the only competition of Tesla being other electric cars, which has never been the case. It was just its most distinguishing feature, but ultimately it's an implementation detail.
If you want to argue that there is really nothing superior about Tesla's engineering that's fine, but you can't shove implementation details under the rug when it suits you. For there to be nothing superior in their engineering there must also be no implementation detail that is superior.
My "implementation detail" comment above does not refer to the quality of engineering overall, but specifically in the context of competition. Yes, when comparing electric cars, the quality of the electric engine is a very large element; but it is much smaller if we're comparing all the elements that matter to someone buying a car (quality of body construction, interior finishing, steering etc).
Why should they bother? They can go into electrics at their own pace, when the infrastructure and demand is better, and still eat Tesla's lunch.
Heck, even Audi A.G. that you've mentioned (not close to being the biggest car company) is comparable to Tesla numbers-wise.
In many industries it's not the first movers that get the market, it's the big mature market-friendly solutions (sort of how the iPod wasn't the first commercial mp3 player).
It's not like people want them to optimize for acceleration anyway...
>Why should they bother? They can go into electrics at their own pace, when the infrastructure and demand is better, and still eat Tesla's lunch.
I had a lecture about electric mobility last semester where a tech lead (don't want to dox them) from Daimler's electric truck program and a tech lead from Daimler's electric car program were invited. In regards to electric trucks things seem to be going great but the electric car program had massive problems with Tesla. The person in question was very hyped about the competition but admitted they got beat with the previous gen cars and that they had to completely redesign their processes to be quicker since Tesla is constantly updating their models. They were hoping to be slightly better than Tesla this gen and to get ahead next gen. So in summary I'd say that didn't turn out great for them.
>It's not like people want them to optimize for acceleration anyway...
The many YouTube views of teslas beating sports cars would beg to differ. If people didn't want acceleration everyone would be driving an 80HP hatchback or a 120-160HP SUV.
So, being on par (on even a tad ahead) of the biggest competitor in the current gen, and being ahead of the competition in the next gen, is bad? Sounds fairly good to me, especially when you have trucks, ICE and EV, and ICE cars that provide a lot of cash to finance all of that development.
That's kind of the issue. Daimler's EV car project is considered a flop because it's only alive due to Daimler being able to lose money from it.
If they started earlier they would have been able to earn some of that money that went to Tesla, could have ironed out the issues while EVs were still considered in something like an open beta where owners had a lot more tolerance for issues and their processes would have become more agile naturally due to the competition with Tesla. Not to mention they could have improved their image as a luxury EV manufacturer by being one of the first.
You can even see the panic about being late to the game on Daimler's part. Their first gen EVs was made using ICE chassis which logically could not compete with cars designed from the ground up to be electric.
They can't enter a new market at their own pace when it is eating demand for their existing market. If competitors wait another 10 years to bring a serious EV to market, they won't have the revenue to cover their expenses on their existing ICE business lines, much less fund the capex needed to get into EVs. And most car companies have a lot of debt, so the problem will be even worse.
Right now EVs make up such a minimal percentage of the car market that they aren't making a meaningful dent in ICE demand, but once they hit 10% or more, car companies that don't have a slice of that segment are going to be feeling it financially. I expect there will be major casualties in the car business because of failure to get into the EV market fast enough.
Benz is a little behind, but Porsche and Audi are doing just fine, in general. The Taycan and etron gt are both fantastic vehicles that compare well with the Model S. The larger etron SUV is about to get a revision that will make it very competitive as well.
The only one that I dislike within Audi is the Q4 etron. Its too close to the id4, IMO.
Tesla showed that there is a viable market for electric cars if the look and work like "regular" cars, not tiny spaceships, and if the supporting infrastructure is in place (Superchargers).
Tesla was not the first EV sold in the US. Earlier attempts by the established manufacturers were curiosities at best. And now that Tesla proved that EVs can actually be good, and can be made profitable, those established manufacturers are willing to move into that market.
So, no, it's not about engineering, it's about taking the risk and committing to expanding the market.
Exactly, Tesla also pushed the envelope with charging speeds, at a time when a lot of people in the industry were limiting things to 50kw and treating EVs as little purely city cars.
The iMiev preceded the Tesla and sold better in many part of the world because it was a more decent proposal.
What Tesla did was making greenwashing and wasting energy with electricity dfast and cool. It is probably better than wasting with ICE in nuclear powered countries but that is not what the world need right now or ever.
Not sure about engineering.
But they build a electric-car factory from scratch in Berlin in 2 years during the pandemic.
Check how many years other companies take to build ICE or electric car factories…
Not sure how “completed” it is, but it already produced Model Y, right?
Compare that with VW, how many electric cars they are making, and how long did the biggest auto-manufacter in Germany (not a bad country for Engineering standards) took to get factories ready for EVs?
Not compared to manufacturers with decades of experience no. But making cars is hard. Starting Tesla from a clean sheet is impressive.
Think about all the Chinese manufacturers, that for years were churning out the butts of jokes. How many of those would have survived in an actual competitive market?
No. But he took it from the proverbial garden shed to a global company.
I'm not a musk fan boy, but what he did with Tesla is impressive.
Compared to the company they were buying chassis from (lotus). If someone took lotus to the size of Tesla in less than 2 decades, would you not say that's impressive?
Starting a boutique sports car manufacturer is 'relatively' easy. Making a global car company, not so much.
Yeah, his skill is in hucksterism. That can be used for good (Tesla), but it can also be used for ill (all the hyperloop nonsense). But he's still a huckster.
When I use the term "hard-core engineering", I'm not referring to how "hard" people work. I'm referring to how advanced the required engineering is to accomplish a goal.
I think this is a really interesting move, that, if Elon hadn't fucked things up so badly, could actually have a chance of making the acquisition work. I think that TikTok is a political issue and the government would like to (and IMO should) kill it because of the Chinese issue, but won't because they fear the user backlash. If Vine could gain enough of a user base to be a credible fallback option, then banning TikTok from the US market would be politically feasible, and Vine would be worth a fortune.
I do not think twitter has the ML capabilities you need to built a TT competitor, and they aren’t just competing with TT anymore. YouTube, IG, and FB are already getting pretty close. Elon would have to something pretty different than just copying them
SpaceX did some good standard mainstream solutions. Sometimes success is not about some exotic innovation but doing your normal job well. A standard lox kerosene gas generator rocket engine. Flat aluminum panel construction. Only the interstage is composite. Started small with Falcon 1. The Merlin engine had heritage from NASA's FASTRAC program.
If you look at Ariane V, Atlas V or Delta IV, they all have some peculiarities and operational warts. Large solid rockets, Russian engine, hydrogen. In some sense, Falcon 9 is the most "ordinary" of the launchers available now.
He also spent 44 billion on it, which he had, instead of using said 44 billion to lobby politicians of both parties and invest directly into whatever he wanted to do with the weapons program money. Sounds like a really solid strategy to me.
Lobbying is surprisingly cheap. The entire pharma industry spends $5B/year, while the entire fossil fuel industry spends $2B/year[0]. Both have achieved a large degree of control over government decisions affecting them.
Elon could have had his weapons program for $1B. He could have dominated defense spending for a decade for $25B. I don’t think the ROI of this $44B of very indirect investment will compare.
Keep in mind he actually spent around half that. There were significant loans and other investments contributing.
He needs more than lobbying, he needs to sway an election. But there were obviously other reasons as well, he probably thinks a hive mind is cool to own and he could finally build his everything app X, etc.. it's just the orbital weapons program is near the top of that list as he thinks it's necessary to save humanity from itself. From free-wheeling philosophy discussions, he seems to think this SkyNet system is actually a kind of Roko's Basilisk.
It was $13B in loans from a variety of banks. Lenders makes yes/no decision on loans, they do not retain management interest the way equity investors do.
This is what I hate about politics and political reporting. People can make a vaguely plausible sounding insinuation about anything being connected. And then noone can disprove it.
But.. isn't he trying to turn it into a Super App like WeChat? That means they have to build about 10 other huge products plus every new idea the boss comes out with in by next week. After having their headcount cut in half. Sounds pretty hardcore to me
If he’s trying to do that, then I’d say he should focus outside of engineering and more on product design, marketing, and brand.
“How to build a Super App” is not that complicated, from an engineering perspective. It does requires hard work, especially if you want to build it fast.
But the big problem is not really how to build it as much as how to make it successful: how to make people use your app over other ones they already use. There are apps like Venmo and WhatsApp that cover WeChat’s use cases pretty well, why should people switch to Twitter?
Step one would probably be to get people to trust your app. I don’t think the latest developments at Twitter make it seem particularly trustworthy
> the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes
As someone is reported to have been asked in a Twitter job interview, when a celebrity with 10,000,000 followers sends out a tweet, how do you deliver them all within 3 seconds?
Did someone measure the 3 seconds delay on tweets sent to 10 mil followers ? Or just some assumption based on lower scale tests ?
I'd imagine "shard the servers serving the subscription to users, accessing sharded database/queue of new tweets" would get you close. Much easier to do with established software now than when twitter was created tho.
if my memory serves me correctly, for "standard" users, tweets are push - it will be pushed to all your subscribers, so they get instant feeds. for "celebrities", tweets are pull - when you open your feed it will pull the latest tweets for your celebrities from a dedicated cache for celebrity tweets
Who in their right mind would rely on Tweets for a calamity??
Phones have built-in support for emergency messages (that bypass all normal silences and notification hiders, unless you explicitly go into settings and disable emergency message support), and carriers are required by law to broadcast such messages to everyone in range.
Twitter is a niche social network (at least in most of the world) and even of those that use it, a huge number will have various forms of disabled notifications.
I personally am rarely on Twitter but it used to be an invaluable resource when you're in an area and don't really have time for a fully fleshed out news article to come out the next day about what's going on on the ground. Block club Chicago was tweeting and retweeting videos of police beating up protesters that night a couple blocks from my apartment in 2020, well ahead of the articles that came out the next day.
It was also interesting to see in real time an active disinformation campaign materialize and disappear that same day. Up until around 1 AM there were a lot of people posting about how the "Proud Boys" were planning to show up or had shown up and encouraging people to bring weapons, then all initial tweets were deleted late at night, with only screen shots or people who had quoted them still being available on the site. But that was a problem I hope would be fixed instead of the removal of the checks to make it all in to a shit show.
Sure, I'm not saying Twitter had no value or that Musk isn't destroying what value it had - he clearly is.
I'm just pointing out a limited fact - that the 3s limit is not relevant even for emergency situations, as no one does or should rely on emergency tweets.
It's used for notifying residents of earthquake, tsunami, and other disaster risks. Residents in japan for most immediate disasters will hear an alert through the national system (via phones, TV, radio, etc) and on top of that residents can check the NERV twitter or other sources to determine what degree of threat it is and what the next best course of action is.
Was like "Huh, didn't know Anno took the name of a real organisation for his show", but from seeing the logo is the logo of the fictional anime organisation, the inspiration is clearly reversed. It seems a real app that gives notifications from actual earthquake warning systems, I wonder if they licensed that logo.
EDIT: Apparently they did some sort of cross promo deal with 3.0+1.0 after existing for a few years, so Khara is aware of them so they must have some sort of agreement to use that name and logo
Agreed. That's what the J-alert system is for. It sends out your basic "get to cover", "stay covered", "find high ground" type alerts but the NERV bulletins give you quite a bit more useful information on where else is affected and what impact that will have. Also worth noting that NERV supports a mobile app which can give you only the useful subset of notifications.
IMHO J-alert is for the first second and NERV is for the seconds after.
I mean, their original setup during early years (and I'm not making this up) required them to restart their Rails service every day, else it would crash/stuck because of memory leaks.
That's not a "tech startup" based on "hardcore engineering", that's a startup based on a social idea and implemented with some trivial tech.
Scaling this to hundreds of millions is not exactly a "hardcore engineering" thing either. Mostly regular engineering with some good practices (like share nothing) and devops. Tons of companies do just the same, today you can even do it from your bedroom by building on top of AWS, GAE, etc, there are even templates for this...
I think you're dramatically underestimating the scope and scale of the problems Twitter had to solve. See the thread below for examples of the sort of solutions they had to build because open source or cloud-hosted solutions weren't available or viable.
>Do you think they still run Ruby that can't reclaim allocated unmanaged memory?
No, I don't.
My point is their initial success years (which wasn't that off the current product) wasn't some hardcore engineering feat: just a cruder-than-average Rails app.
Around 2012-2015 we had someone on-call over the holidays do a redeploy every few days because of Rails memory growth at our now-IPO'd ecommerce giant.
This growth impacted every rails app back then, the popular ones more quickly is all..
It is not about engineering, it is about conformity. As you implicitly acknowledge, Twitter does not need as much engineering, nor does it need creative engineering. For engineering, Elon needs cogs, preferably those who buy into his cult of personality.
As for the hard to quantify work, Elon needs people he can trust. Even if the existing people are good, they can not be trusted. Committing to something like Twitter 2 is as good an oath as it gets. The other alternative is to just fire everyone he did not hire himself.
Engineering, for most digital products, is as good as much you can ignore it exists.
I remember the dread that must be dealing with their process load when I get to a whale page, not when I'm tweeting successfully.
Anyway, the thing here is that since EM wants to enact that much change in a short time frame as possible, and guessing he's likely to make mistakes along the way, he'll need engineering work as hard as possible.
> It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company.
Yes like Instagram and others. It was not tech stack that was sold but community of users. I guess Musk's lenders knows this.
> company is on a website that makes it a tech company
Well, we generally consider social media companies tech companies. And since they don't really have anything else other than the tech stack (and the users on it, but they don't "have" those), not sure as what you would characterise it.
> ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running
What makes you think that the desired engineering improvements are about "keeping [the] website running"?
It seems to me that what is being sought are engineering solutions to, for example, stop the spread misinformation without censorship. That would be pretty cool, I think. And I can imagine a way of pulling it off, because we actually have such mechanisms in the (non-internet) social networks that make up what Jonathan Rauch calls The Constitution of Knowledge.[1]
These mechanisms use network effects to amplify good information and attenuate (but not censor) bad information. What is good and bad? The network decides this by what information it attenuates or amplifies. Bad scientific papers don't get cited, good ones do. The stories in the National Enquirer don't get picked up by other papers, and nobody believes them to be true.
This obviously isn't perfect, but it's about as good as it's gonna get, and works pretty well in practice.
Internet social media disrupted these mechanisms by its extreme virality, which seems to apply specifically to bad information. It just spreads extremely fast, literally exponentially (not the "very large" meaning of "exponential"). Kind of like a virus.
And we learned recently that to suppress a viral pandemic, completely 100% sterilising immunity is not actually needed. You just need to slow it down enough to get the R number below 1, ideally significantly below 1. That's what I think the "Do you want to read the article first before retweeting?" prompts are for: slow things down a bit.
Of course "slowing things down a bit" is counter to your economic self-interest and fiduciary responsibility when you're an ad-driven company. So getting off ads completely or at least partly is an important part of it.
> Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product
Who thinks that? Why do you believe that anyone thinks this? While I don't agree with Elon's approach, the causation would clearly be the other way around: there is a lot of engineering to do to get to a better product (less dependent on ads, more attenuation of bad information without censorship etc.). And all that has to be done while under a bit of pressure, this ain't a Greenfield project with unlimited runway. So yeah, might get a bit "hardcore".
> Well, we generally consider social media companies tech companies. And since they don't really have anything else other than the tech stack (and the users on it, but they don't "have" those), not sure as what you would characterise it.
Consider where the bulk of the revenue comes from and you’ll find out what industry the company is actually in.
So ads.. as much as I dislike the industry, that's also an eng intensive task, right, as you attempt to predict user tendencies, raise engagement by showing the right shit, capture more data, and engage in the bot arms race.
Interestingly enough, it turns out that Twitter never really built a DR system for performance ads, hence why the brands pulling out can crater their revenue.
nope, it's direct response advertising, which is the stuff that gets you to click and purchase online.
Both FB and Google have really successful systems for this, and it insulates them massively from brand safety concerns. It appears that Twitter never invested in this (which is kinda insane tbh), and hence the large brand advertisers have a lot more power over them.
Maybe youre right about them pursuing engagement for its own sake, maybe they're not in that game.
Though, whatever approach you have in discovery, or ranking posts, you're having an impact on your users, and promote a certain dynamic, no? I imagine their next approach won't be the equivalent of letting go of the steering wheel, just maybe not mindlessly chasing the same metrics as they are currently.
Maybe that's a little too social psych to call tech/engineering, but I imagine the data science that would support that would be quite exciting.
Facebook and Google have huge tech operations, but Facebook and Twitter are content distributors and market aggregators, not tech companies.
You can buy a jet or a rocket, but you can't buy a Twitter or a Facebook. You can't even hire part of their stack. (FB has content deals and APIs for advertisers and marketers, but not - so far as I know - direct access to the servers.)
Which is why AWS is a tech company. But Amazon is an online store that happens to use tech.
It's like saying book publishers are really just printers, or FedEx is really an airline and truck driving company.
Some publishers do indeed do their R&D for print operations and logistics. But they're still primarily content houses. Any engineering that happens is a means to a productive end, not a product in itself.
I always thought tech was used as the lever in a tech company..
Doesn't matter what you sell, or service you offer, but if you're leveraging technology to add large numbers of users with a marginal increase in cost, I see that as a tech company.
This generally means there is an internal focus on the technology itself as any improvement can have a direct link to a user's LTV.
But maybe I'm talking less tech company, and more tech led organisation..
> engineering solutions to, for example, stop the spread misinformation without censorship.
I really don't think this is an engineering problem. If I was a tech lead and a product manager came up to me with this, I'd tell them they need to figure out what they mean before they start talking to engineers. Software-Development is not concerned with the nature of truth and misinformation, it is concerned with what works given precise goals.
Nobody in engineering school or at an engineering job gets taught or learns what counts as misinformation and how to assess it: you need people with humanities expertise for this.
The "Do you want to read..." prompts are actually a good example of what I mean, because the engineering that goes into making those is quite trivial. But the idea of using them, trying to make them effective at their goal, and determining how much they're working, these are all things that fall outside of engineering, and have more to do with product-design and sociology.
Creating a feature is not as important as getting people to use it, and use it the right way.
Based on the features Elon has rolled out so far (Twitter Blue), it seems to me they're putting more emphasis on just building it, rather than figuring out how people will use it and whether it will be beneficial
By that definition no tech company is a tech company. People search things on google because they want to find information , not because of the algorithms that bring that information. People use stable diffusion because they want to create images , whatever the cool ai technology behind it.
I would argue that when the primary products of a company are technologies, they are tech companies. That would include TSMC, AMD, AWS and much of Microsoft.
If your products are just BUILT using technology, well then you may consider yourself in another business. Whether that is a clothing, cars, pharmaceutical, weaponry or social media platforms (sorted by increasing potential for harm ;)
Still, even if you're in the last category, it may be fair to consider it "tech" if the main challenges/differentiating factors in creating the product is scienc/engineering/technological rather than for instance design, marketing or organizational efficiency.
Exactly. In the real world no one cares what tech stack you use, whether it's a monolith or not. Businesses serve customer needs. Tech is the tool and is only useful to that extent.
> I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter.
The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Twitter board. They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. The offer to buy the company outright might have been more spite than anything else.
I think he calmed down and realised what a bad idea his offer was (especially at that price), and then spent the next month or so trying to back out.
The second time? Well, he was kind of trapped and was actually forced to buy it.
The twitter board were suing him to hold him to the binding deal to buy at $44 billion that he signed. He only finalised the deal to avoid the lawsuit. It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.
He bought it because he was sued for specific performance and was legally screwed in every available way. He literally waived due diligence and signed a contract with a specific performance clause.
Companies couldn’t prove a MAC in the middle of the 08 housing crash, musk sure as hell wasn’t having screwed every legal argument he had available weeks in advance.
His options were buy now for 44 billion or buy maybe a month later for 44 billion plus whatever the court decided to tack on for hellishly bad faith dealing and arguments.
His legal team tried every truck available and even a lousy “well we said we’d buy it so they should drop the lawsuit “ play. The court saw right through and said “you get 4 weeks to buy and if not then the suit continues”
So they paid up because to claim you’re going to but then to not go through with it would have seen the most wrathfully phenomenal court proceeding in history.
Discovery was just an added bonus of embarrassment and very unlikely to be related at all. Every sound legal mind working for musk was probably screaming at him to shut up and eventually told him he was going to have to go through. The ONLY way this current situation could be worse is if he had continued to try and fight it after his last Hail Mary because that specific court exists almost solely to VERY quickly mitigate multi billion dollar deals and would absolutely make a very clear example out of anyone who thought they were too rich to touch.
Musk may be one of the most wealthy men in the world but Delaware deals with companies with MUCH higher net worth and resources constantly.
Trump is a con-man. But Musk? Seeing how Musk's companies have actually put real cars on the road and rockets into space, I'm having a hard time buying that particular accusation.
Yes, he was forced to buy it ... after he initially signed a paper committing to buy it. He was only forced after trying to get out of what he had signed.
It would have cost him "only" a $B to weasel out, much less than expected losses. So it has value to him greater than those losses. Would be unsurprising if he used it for political leverage. I don't think he is allowed to run for the presidency, but he can probably seat his choice.
This is a common misunderstanding. The $1B clause was for if the deal was blocked by regulators, it had nothing to do with Elon just deciding to back out of the deal, so just paying that to walk away was never an option. The commenters above saying that the court was about to order specific performance have it right.
(Reverse) break-up fees are a tool to ensure commitment of both sides to a deal. The main target in the Twitter deal was probably the financing, not the regulatory case, making it a bit less attractive to fail the financing for the deal somehow to get out of it (although there was some debate how realistic that option was anyways). And in the other direction, Twitter was on the hook for a billion for various things it could've done to hurt the deal, e.g. the board recommending shareholders vote against it, or for a competing offer.
Its clear that Jack Dorsey let Elon know about the only real alternative path for Twitter, which is opening protocols and reversing profit-seeking decisions made many years ago now.
However, I'm beginning to think Elon didn't get the deep dive he needed to understand what this really means. I have my ears up for the language or relationships showing he is really spending time on this... but I have only seen a dog chasing its tail.
At some level, Elon is characteristically aligned with this version of Twitter, however by saddling current Twitter with so much serviceable debt it is probably more difficult to go back in time than it ever was before.
Dorsey is buddy buddy with Musk and has proven time and time again he'll say whatever needs to be said in the moment without ever committing to it. Excuse me for not believing a single second any idea he puts forward. He had every opportunity to do it while he was there, was majority shareholder for the longest time.
Him saying he's working on web5 should really clue you in on the kind of lying clown he is.
> But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened—the bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five blades.
Yep. Although I don’t understand why anyone thought that would amount to anything WRT Twitter itself. I honestly laughed when I read this take a few weeks back:
An open protocol isn’t going to help Twitter’s debt load, indeed giving up platform control will very very much do the opposite. Musk knows this. And anyways, there are no engineers left to massively redesign their platform to become less profitable.
There is also a question of spending $44B to rebuild a company from scratch. Couldn’t Musk have spent under a billion to create a startup and effectively competed with Twitter ?
If he really wants to do that, by buying Twitter he removed the incumbent and also acquired its users. Much easier than competing and trying to make people switch to a new service.
My unverifiable prediction: no matter how many users will leave Twitter, the ones left will be more than the ones that would be using a new service after 1, 2, 5 years.
Well, not often, no. I'm not really expecting that to happen with Twitter, I just think it IS a possibility. How many websites/apps that were as big as Twitter have totally disappeared?
I'd argue neither was anywhere near as big as twitter. In terms of users, maybe — I have no idea. But in terms of reach and influence? I don't think so.
I think regardless numbers, it is usually a slow burn for situations like these. And probably plenty of people will probably not see a space to fill and try their luck. Hopefully, one of them will work.
Curious about how well collateralized that debt is. At current rates I’d be surprised banks would want to write 10s of billions for twitter. Particularly when the business plan is “I will lay off 75% of the company and hope things hold together.”
I have only been reading the details through Money Stuff, but according to Levine, the banks are taking a bath on the deal. Currently trying to underwrite the debt for 60-70 cents on the dollar.
And they were offered like 50 cents, if memory serves well. Brings some serious Margin Call vibes, doesn't it? "Sell everything, today", getting 50 cents is better the 30 or, worst case, nothing. Looking forward for the banks to find loopholes in the agreements with Musk and sue him for negligence or something.
Margin Call. I have no idea why it wasn't more well-known. Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, Aasif Mandvi, Stanley Tucci. It's about a thinly-disguised Goldman Sachs realizing the housing market was about to collapse in 2008 and unloading all their toxic assets in a single day.
I get the sense that Dorsey played Musk hard. Musk heard what he wanted to hear, and Dorsey walked away with a cool billion. Musk is wrecking the place and laying the ground for the next thing, which Dorsey was already working on.
Right? I can't help but wonder if he's planning on doing something in the fediverse in some way. It'd be interesting to see a bunch of ex-twitter folks boot up a crowdfunded mastodon instance.
Interesting. I hope this ends up being a pull request or somesuch on activitypub, rather than a standalone competing standard. They're right that migration is a problem on activitypub atm, though I'm not sure there's a good way to build it into the protocol. Maybe have a server tag a couple of others as trusted backups?
But he was at the helm of Twitter for how long? He had the opportunity to pursue all those things. Musk and Darsey’s text message thread was just two billionaires convincing themselves they’re as smart as they think they are.
"We have to throw away the entire business and product and rebuild it in a model where our old thing is impossible" is a tough sell to a boardroom, obviously.
I mean, there is a model that works, it's Discord. Small self-associating groups from various parts of our lives. TBH that's so far ahead of facebook - humans draw meaning from being in groups where there groups are small enough to know and have repeat interactions with people. You all know bigger discords you're in (gpu drop discord lol) where you're just a face in the sea and it's much harder to maintain meaningful relationships in a place like that, fediverse would be like that too. Humans evolved for smaller group sizes and a group of like 30 or 50 active users is EXCELLENT for social media, Discord nails this perfectly, personal communication breaks down at like 75-100 active users tops.
Facebook is an ocean and it's unstructured (Google Plus or whatever had user grouping, which was an advancement imo - you can say "that's a work person" and interact with them in certain ways) unless you go out of your way to set it up like that. Discord really just works amazingly well for that, I have tons of hobby groups and game groups where I've known people for a super long time and friend groups from whatever community. Kids have the "school chat discords" and if I was in college we'd have had study groups on it I'm sure, we had FB groups then. No reason you can't have a "family discord" too (so uncool, mom!).
Mastodon basically is (or could be) that as a protocol, if you want to treat it like that. Dress it up in a discord-like client and get it onto phones/etc and make the user-story good. People already show they'll pay to self-host discord servers etc, so come up with a cool "Algo" style ansible deployment thingy that makes it super simple, just fires up a server on an AWS account for you and gives you a link you can send to your friends etc. Congrats, you are now the Underwater Basketweaving Enthusiasts Discord Server, here's a random (or generated human-meaningful) link. Not everybody needs to run a server, but, make it easy enough that people can do it. And as a user, just join the discords you like and let the server op run it/mod it, just like now.
What exactly does Twitter do in this business model, though, lol? And how do you get there? Twitter's "broadcast" model is nothing at all like that. I guess they're gonna... throw it all away and start fresh? Seems like that's what's happening I guess.
But I guess I just don't see the value in federation generally, to the end user. Pods aren't authoritative, they're decentralized and human-meaningful (in Zooko's Triangle), so oauth type stuff doesn't really matter, I would never want to "auth against UnderwaterBasketweaving" or whatever, because it's trivial to spin up another instance and make fake users etc. And why would I want to "cross the streams" between my home and work pods, or let Wendys marketing come and mine/advertise my server, etc, if I'm the one running it? Am I paying for wendys to scrape my content? Consistent cross-discord-instance identity is all I really want from social media, at most and that doesn't need to be tied to this at all, you can do that via google auth or some other idp(s) that solves that problem. Where is the revenue stream in this at all?
I don't want "community moderation service" in my decentralized communities... there are places where "work moderation" would pitch a fit and some places where work protocol would be incredibly uncool. But with small communities, O(1) moderation works fine, you don't need it, just let the discord server op do discord mod shit and delegate roles/etc to other mods too. Yes, godmode is fine in self-organizing communities because if moderation drifts sufficiently far from group norms the community will reorganize without you. Crossing the streams also ruins that, it means you have to moderate the firehose or punt it to an authority who will, and it's all just a big "why" when discord mods are fine.
Similarly, want a feed of interesting content? We had an app for that, it was called "mee6 bot", and the server admin asks what twitters/youtubes/etc people want for certain channels. You want a new channel? Ask for it, or make it. I am on a server with 30-ish active members and everyone has basic "add channel/rename/reorder/etc" and "warn" punishments etc, it's fine. If you're constantly being a dick you'd get kicked out but it's never been a problem. Family discord, or work discord, or some other close-knit irl community? just let people do things. social ostracism will keep people in line with the norms, people mostly don't like losing friends.
(maybe disk quotas though, because that is one that will add up faster than users realize. Nobody has solved "free content service" without it being tethered to another business, like youtube or imgur or discord. no, I am not interested in your IPFS childporncoin either. give me a sustainable, "local" method for hosting content... like requiring users to host content themselves on an instance or server hosts providing user-quotas for hosting etc. Define how important you consider your content (indefinite, 30 days, etc) and refuse new uploads if they're past quota.)
And if you just want a service where you click it and it runs in a hosted instance by a cloud provider... well, discord exists, and dropbox remains popular even in a world of NASs, etc.
But none of that has anything to do with Twitter or will have anything to do with Twitter, lol.
Discord is absolutely horrible for discovery tho. It's fine for private communities but it is entirely ungooglable so you need the other forms of media to even get people to attend say your community around some video game.
I actually detest some companies using it as official communication for their product as none of the question answered are googlable so instead of googling "how to do X" and get some forum post, there is nothing and you have to sign onto their discord and ask same question.
Impossible search is a feature: where there is search there are ads, paid links and SEO spam, instead of people you trust, or at least people you know, giving out links to Discord servers.
I've been having the same feeling about discord - this is the future for social media, or at least the social media I want:
- Smaller streams, fewer people, more personal.
- No great feed of everything. You go to a place to read about a thing. Different thing, different place.
If discord had a bit more work that would enable persistent threads like reddit, and encouraged longer, more thoughtful posts like HN and quality moderation, it would be perfect.
Actually, what I want is HN/Discord mashup. Anybody want to fund it?
basically: humans can totally interact in 10 x O(50) communities despite being utterly unable to interact in 1 x O(500) community. That's really the same lesson as scrum teams too, just at a different scale.
human empathy and working set is totally limited by team size and cache level, you need to optimize for facing the same problems/interests as the person next to you.
Families/localities/regions are the cache layers of empathy. And I'm using "family" broadly.
>If discord had a bit more work that would enable persistent threads like reddit, and encouraged longer, more thoughtful posts like HN and quality moderation, it would be perfect.
Facebook Groups is this product - but it's exceedingly difficult to find the small percentage of well-moderated, smaller groups which are specialized/for enthusiasts. Also, the FB sub-comment/response structure is far worse than HN or Reddit and leaves much to be desired. But I've joined a few with good moderation and thoughtful, interesting discussions.
That being said, any group with [thousands] of members or loose moderation devolves into an absolute shitshow of shit posting and scam/spam posters.
I thought about it more, and you are correct that Reddit enables private subreddits. My circle of friends on the Internet have one - but we've stopped using it. For me, a problem was that Reddit itself became polluted by influencers, so I avoid it (the whole site) as much as possible now. Since Discord hasn't had that problem, it was an easy, pleasant move to make.
So why not keep the main instance pay to play, for any official and public accounts, and the anonymous parts of the net get their own distributed instances?
I don’t think so. I think although Elon is poorly managing Twitter. What we are seeing is how poorly managed Twitter was behind closed doors. Years of technical debt and no movement or improvements. Sounds like people were just getting over paid and producing very little. Atleast that’s what it seems like from all the ex employees ranting on Twitter about being fired.
I'm not quite sure how I'm defending him. I don't really like him, especially after he voiced his opinions on Ukraine and Taiwan, I hope he loses all his money. And I'll never touch a Tesla.
All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.
99% of companies would have imploded at the same pace.
Offending everyone who matters that runs the product you just bought and terrorizing all your employees is a fast and easy road to completely imploding any company.
Indeed. I agree with most if not all of the changes Musk made, but it was obvious to anyone that he made them in the worst possible way on the worst possible schedule. He couldn't be doing more damage if he was deliberately trying to tank the company.
He did that idiocy because company wasn't profitable in the first place tho.
Like, yeah, if he did that to well functioning company it would fall apart too, but Twitter wasn't a well-functioning company. And by that I mean "he would ruin it slower".
> All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally.
Except that's not true at all. What he did is saddle it with a bunch of debt and fire of a bunch of really-poorly-considered cosr cutting and revenue enhancement ideas that clearly weren’t thought through or part of a coherent strategy.
He might have and end-game vision, but he had no plausible roadmap to deal with the sucking wounded he inflcted with the acquisition, much less to get to his end-game vision.
No sorry. When you have people on Twitter claiming that they should be fixing 10+ years of technical debt to improve performance. And the platform is overrun by bots and spam, issues are not resolved. Complaints dating back 10 years are not addressed in any way. There’s obviously internal problems.
If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter.
Engineers not being good is probably not the issue. But I’m pretty sure it comes from higher up.
It’s also evident that Twitter was poorly managed by the fact it’s pretty much never made a profit.
>>If the platform cannot run for 5 minutes without someone pressing a button to keep it online then I have to question what 1000s of engineers are doing at Twitter.
It is not just tech debt per se. In larger companies most middle managers have no incentive to fix things for the long term. And lack of automation means they get to hire more people, which is good for them, as it expands their fiefdom.
I know one company in California which hires H1-Bs by the thousands, many even make it to Green cards. Their work- Somebody sends a bunch of values from the India office, they manually edit shell scripts(written ages ago, by some dude who has long left), run it, get the values and enter those values into some internal application. The thought that all this could be done by web api's didn't cross their mind. Never mind that automating this simple thing could help cut employee count by the thousands. Another place that I heard of, similar things but with SQL. The whole thing could be automated. But somebody wrote a bunch of shell scripts and left shop. Now people need to take outputs from SQL scripts and feed to the next ones. And then cut paste the data into some system.
In the woke world that we live in, where everybody is supposed to be special, and we are supposed to lie to ensure nobody gets hurt feelings. Most people forget, these jobs should have never existed at the first place. Many a times cutting them actually leads to more profits, and saves lots of management effort. Sure people losing jobs is sad, but if you are doing a job that shouldn't exist at the first place, you should likely move before you are let go.
The world is full of wasted effort, it is many times even tolerated for all sorts of reasons. But some times it is not.
He lost me on Ukraine and Taiwan too. Free democratic societies allowed him to become something. Dictators and Communism for everyone that stands in his way towards more wealth.
I was determined to buy a Tesla. Now we placed an order for a VW ID.4.
I really don't get why people dislike his Ukraine stance.
"Beat up Russia a bunch, make peace and throw Russia a bone by letting them keep Crimea." seems like the death minimising stance to me and in the best interests of the inhabitants of the each region.
If Russia gets anything out of this war it would be anything but death minimising. It will signal to them, and all other states, that aggressive wars are viable. They are in Ukraine because war has worked out for them in Georgia and Chechnya. You are literally espousing a pro-imperialism stance masquerading as a moderate position.
Because Russia has been taking pieces of land from Ukraine since 2014. If you'd hand over more land to Russia now, they'd invade again in a couple of years, with their army stronger than it is now.
Besides that, appeasement has never worked against aggressors in the past. It basically looks like Musk is calling for another Munich Agreement. It shows a complete lack of understanding of history, and of international relations.
Because it is dumb, insensitive to people losing their lives on the the front lines and makes it seem like Russia is _actually willing_ to get out of Ukraine if only it is allowed to keep Crimea, which it clearly is not?
I was a fan for all that Musk did with SpaceX. Single-handedly dropping costs to LEO and creating a civilian / commercial space industry -- mind blowingly impressive, and willed into existence by one man.
When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.
I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.
I get the impression that others at SpaceX moderate and "manage" him.
Let him get distracted with micro-managing whatever cool project is currently takes his fancy, while they do the more boring job of keeping the company running, and making sure the customers are happy.
I bet these people are extra happy when he is focusing on projects that don't have customers yet, like Starship/BFR.
Twitter might actually be the first time were he has 100% control over a large company without someone in the background moderating his more wild impulses.
Gwynne Shotwell is the too seldom acknowledged hero of SpaceX, who has played exactly that role of keeping the lights on, moderating Musk’s worse impulses, and managing him into less destructive directions. It’s been evident for years.
There are similar people at Tesla, who focus on the endless operational tweaking and improvement that Musk finds boring, and who slowly fixed all the most critical issues on the Model 3 line while Musk increasingly took to politics and social media.
I’m not one of those who believes Musk hasn’t done anything or played no part in SpaceX or Tesla’s success, because that’s clearly false. But he also hasn’t been the sole genius responsible for all the success or infallible. But too many people have made him believe he was and we’re now seeing the result of that hubris and ignorance.
Yet, Gwynne seems happy to lie about suborbital freight for him, and about colonizing Mars. I have not encountered anyone prominent at Tesla supporting his lies about self-driving (though that doesn't mean none do).
That's a bit ridiculous. Buying Twitter for $44bn was entirely his fault (and I think, a very stupid decision) and he does seem to be running the company into the ground, but were the fundamentals of the business solid before he got there? Did it ever justify its share price? Is ad revenue a sustainable business model? Was it going to remain profitable for long enough for someone who bought in e.g. 2020 to make a good return?
If you go to market and buy a lame horse then flog it into the ground, that's entirely your fault, but it's not like the horse was ever going to race well.
I think the analogy is he bought a house that needed a new foundation and he tried to fix it with kerosene and fire. The issues may well have been fixable but he had no sense of what the issues were to begin with, just his ego-driven edgelord perspective.
It was a rhetorical question: for me the answer is no. TWTR apparently justified its share price to someone on the market, but I think it's been overvalued since IPO.
I have no idea if TSLA is overvalued or undervalued. I don't know enough about the automotive industry, renewable energy regulations, or batteries to even guess.
Why? The business was weeks away from shutting down in 2015 under original ownership, Twitter looked to be saved from 2018 - 2019, but not really, seeing as 2018-2019 were the only 2 profitable years for Twitter ever
Twitter was leaking money for 2020 and 2021, the trend looked to be continuing for 2022, they had an OK first quarter, and maybe they were going to continue to do well, but I sincerely doubt it seeing how every single tech stock has performed this year. Q2 alone blew away $344 million loss compared to Q1's $513 million gain. I also sincerely doubt Twitter was being led well by looking at their earnings reports and the money hole that punctured the company coffers in 2020Q2. The middling performance through 2021 continued when that should've been Twitter's best years, all other tech stocks even ad agencies were printing money, why was Twitter not doing the same?
I think Twitter board's best decision they ever made was offloading the company off to Elon, cut their losses for a clearly failing company with little to no headwind coming their way for the next few quarters at minimum.
But I do need to know why does Elon get the brunt of the blame for Twitter's presumed downfall? Seems like Twitter was already a falling knife by itself
> why does Elon get the brunt of the blame for Twitter's presumed downfall
A few reasons
- he's greatly accelerating its decline in a highly visible and embarrassing way
- he got ripped off. $44b is a hilariously bad deal. He could have saved a few billion and used it to run twitter, at a minor loss, for many years.
- and lastly: he tried to catch a falling knife and is standing around pretending he isn't bleeding. Considering the hubris he has put on display over the past 5 years or so, everyone's taking a moment to enjoy the show.
Are you really "getting ripped off" if you came in with a ridiculously high offer (when no one asked) and they accepted it because they'd be crazy not to?
"I've got this old beater that I'm tired of working out of every day."
Your food truck sucks and your food is no better. You should sell churros.
"Churros don't really match our poboy sandwiches."
I can fix this, I'll just buy you out for a million dollars.
"... ok, sounds good to me."
What do you mean the truck is only worth about three grand? I want out of this deal.
It's the right thing to do with a sinking ship that needs to take big risks. Twitter's previous shareholders are surely very happy with how much money he's taken out of bankers' pockets and put into theirs.
Your breathless narration of that data is certainly a master class in spin. Maybe the company was performing far below what would be possible. But it is hard to look at the data and conclude that there was any imminent risk of its demise.
Twitter posted a net loss of $221 million in 2021, and a $1.1 billion loss in 2020.
Quarters are only good for forecasting and deciding what to do. Financial year is what matters overall. That’s an indicator of the overall success for the year.
In retrospect, most online-only tech companies had a great time during the unusual thing, so much so many of them made the mistake of hiring like the same trends would continue
I mean, Twitter was a slowly sinking ship which he turned into a quickly sinking ship. The guy is entirely to blame for the current situation - engineers and advertisers fleeing - but it’s not like buying it was a clever move in the first place.
Twitter was already failing, just in slow motion. 10 out of the last 12 years, including last year, the company lost money. I never saw the management team propose or execute on a legitimate path to sustainable profitability, either. Elon is just driving into the ground faster than the largely incompetent leadership team before him did.
So what you are saying, is the prior business model did not work, and firing the prior management team, getting rid of complacent employees, and striking out on a new path, is a good idea?
Twitter was on pace to lose billions without him. They were doing massive layoffs under Parag, extrapolating Facebook and Snapchat results gets you Twitter’s anemic last reports as a public company even without the overhang of Musk
Yeah, why do you think they accepted so quickly? They tried to get Wall Street to be interested and they turned their nose up extremely quickly, and that was right after a 50% price drop
That's two figures more than actual. Reportedly, Musk paid Agrawal $42M and spent $120M total on golden parachutes, which is still only low 9 figures. Still obscene. Most employers do not give severance to fired former employees. They were in charge of Twitter while it was losing billions. They should have paid him. He could have saved money right there by giving them the address to the unemployment office.
Maybe... But not all tech debt is bad. As long as it's not holding you back and you are making deliberate choices.
Twitter may have been badly managed, but it was consistent in experience. And in a large way that is a valuable product/feature itself. Elon will change things enough that it won't be like what it was, a giant distributed broadcast platform.
I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. He seems to be very badly advised at the moment. It's going to lead to a elon against the world situation where he wrecks something everyone likes and he's tarnished forever.
He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.
> He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.
He didn't have that option. That was the fee if the deal fell through for other reasons outside Musk's control. Musk didn't have any out in the contract. When that became clear in Delaware, he gave in.
There's a decent chunk of the population that would be ecstatic if Twitter went away and they never had to hear about it again, so he'd probably gain some fans there.
Of course not, if a company is profitable, its technical debt that made the company money and paid the bills. But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years.
> but it was consistent in experience.
Consistent experience of being spammed by bot accounts. Looking at anyone popular and 95% of the replies are bots, or tweeting the wrong word and being spammed by bots. Is a terrible experience which has never been addressed.
> I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself.
I agree. I think over the years popularity has gone to his head, stroked his ego, and he isn't the same person he was 10 years ago. He may not be the greatest example of a 'good' person but wqhat hes done with Tesla, SpaceX, etc, getting the right people in place and such to build these companies up, hes done well, but in the last 4-5 years hes sorta gone off the rails.
> But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years.
Technical debt is rarely that simple. Usually it is a pile of Chesterton's Fences that only the people who built it really understand why its all there, but if you start just ripping it all down then you wind up breaking something important (think "service which scours databases to ensure that they're compliant with GDPR regulations and avoids a billion dollar fine from the EU" or something of that nature). The code may have grown organically and arguably need to be tossed and rewritten, but most of the time the code in its current state is also the requirements doc for the rewrite (and either the rewrite will take 10 times as long as anyone thinks or else the new system will throw away 90% of the old system without understanding it and now you have to deal with pissed off EU regulators and there goes everything you would have saved).
I'm usually on the side where I think its time to take the hard decisions and spend the effort either cleaning up the existing codebase or rewriting it, but that's rarely the way the business sees things, and they'd prefer to just bolt on some more crap yet again to keep it going for another year because they're trying to boost their metrics, not solve long term problems.
We could write a book on the different types of technical debt, obviously dumbing it down to 40 vs 10 servers is a massively over simplification on my part.
My point is when you're in a small company, even dollar counts, if infrastructure isn't trying to optimize hardware utialization then you end up throwing hardware at the problems. If engineering isn't trying to optimize codebases then you're throwing more resources at the problem (people, hardware, time, more services, monitoring, and safe guards). Then there's issues with marketing, sales, management, etc.
The other day we had that tweet from elon 'apologising' for android being slow and the '1000 requests' which was disputed by one of the engineers and he got himself fired.
But what he said is they have 10+ years of technical debt hindering performance.
Large companies like twitter suffer from the idea they are 'too big to fail'. They have 1000s of engineers and I question, what are they doing, you obviously have enough money and resources, but at the same time why are a portion of those people not sitting there optimizing what exists.
We don't see any resolution to bots, we don't see new useful features, we don't see any attempt to address issues people have been complaining about for 10 years. etc. So we have 1000s of engineers doing what exactly? There's some incredibly smart people working or worked at twitter, but their talents were wasted on effectively maintaining a sinking ship by trying to make it sink slower instead of trying to patch the holes and keep it afloat.
What’s missed in these discussions is that you need to get ROI out of the time spent working on code. If you spend all of your time rewriting code, your simply not going to get any ROI.
If a piece of code works and only needs changes once in a blue moon… well then it’s pretty good. Even if it’s a tangled mess of assembly.
Even if that’s true (I just don’t know) the cost alone of servicing the company debt is now greater than the cost of paying all those people to sit around and do nothing, and anyway the problems with Twitter aren’t ones that are fixed by engineering.
> They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder.
They were happy for him to become a director. He balked as soon as it became clear that he'd have to pass the same background check as all the other directors. I wonder why that is?
> It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.
Like... his degrees being dodgy and having been an illegal overstayer in the 90s, which is a documented claim doing the rounds?
He also would have owed fiduciary duties to the TSLA stockholders if he were a director. I think this, and not the D&O questionnaire, was the primary reason he turned down the board seat. No more pumps and dump with TSLA stock or playing fast and loose with SEC filings triggered by stock accumulation.
No-- the $1B was liquidated damages in the case the deal couldn't close for other reasons (regulatory, unable to finance). It didn't give Elon a blanket "out"-- the deal explicitly had a very strong "specific performance" term.
I was half expecting Musk to "fail to find financing" in a way that had plausible deniability, just so he could use the $1 exit clause.
But that wouldn't have saved him from discovery in the court case, and I've also heard rumours the SEC were already looking into him for stock market manipulation over this Twitter thing.
His financing was committed at the time he signed the merger agreement, and the banks that agreed to lend it were pretty tightly committed to the deal. They also have their own separate legal exposure and risk to their franchises if they refused to fund the debt at closing.
If the financing failed to show up through no fault of the acquirer, then yes, the acquirer could terminate and pay a $1 billion break fee. But there have been recent Delaware cases that suggest an acquirer manufacturing grounds for its lenders to refuse to fund will not excuse the acquirer’s obligation to buy the company - regardless of whatever limited termination fee is written into the contract.
I was more than half expecting Musk's financiers to smell the bullshit and run screaming. He's already talking bankruptcy so I'm still wondering why they went forward.
Well, depends on the backing they got from Musk, doesn't it? And honestly, who would have believed someone would burn 44 billion, including 13 billion in dept, so fast to a complete pile of ash? I do wonder so, with a lot of Tesla's success depending on Musks reputation and ability to raise money, what the fallout of this will be. Until the Twitter desaster, Musk was a sure bet for investors. Now? Well, his financing banks wanted 60 cent per dollar when selling the debt on to investors. And they were only offered 50 cent. That alone tells you a lot.
so even if he personally spent $1million on getting lobbyists to convince gov't to say no, that would still only have been $1.1b vs the ~$44 or whatever the price in the window was.
Of course he’s going to do what he defaults to and knows best to try to get out of a bad deal?
Can you really say edgelording so hard you appear to be a legitimate national security threat to get out of a $44bln deal you don’t want is something that doesn’t sound typically Elon Musk?
It looks more like he wanted exclusive Tesla and/or SpaceX deals there. Russia has no proper cars, but China has. The Russian rocket industry might also look attractive, he won't get any Chinese contracts for sure.
The heavily embargoed, historic-enemy of the US Russia?
The one who is actively threatening to nuke us because we’re sending millions of tons of weapons and ammunition to someone they’re invading while we sanction them to the gills?
What are you smoking? There is no way they’d let him export Rocket engines to them, or cars. Likely for decades.
I suspect the FBI visited him after his Putin talk and reminded him that they could make him register as a foreign agent, or go to jail for that. Not that anyone would say anything.
Not to mention the fucking insulting assumption that people were not already working hard. During my tour (left years ago) there have been many time periods when I worked my ass off. I ended up leaving because of the total burn-out and the effect it started to have on my health. Despite that even years later I played with the idea of going back someday. No chance of that now of course. So sad to see it end this way.
I guess, if you buy the premise that cash flow is problem number one and the company needs a significant pivot, then going into crunch-mode and trying to turn the ship as quickly as possible (at the cost of technical and, uh, sleep debt) is a reasonable solution. Maybe not the best, but reasonable.
But it's pretty transparent that the cash flow problem is pretty much a problem because the new owner doesn't really want to own Twitter, or believe it can pay for itself; he wants to own a different product which has as many users as Twitter did. No judgement here, I don't necessarily think he's wrong. But why as an employee would I feel obligated to make his choices my problem?
> I guess, if you buy the premise that cash flow is problem number one
Well, luckily you don't need to buy the premise that cash flow was problem number one—after he bought it, he saddled it with so much debt that it definitely became problem number one!
> What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.
I believe the thesis is he thinks it's possible to duplicate WeChat as a ubiquitous everything-app (news, media, social media, payments, ordering in restaurants, shopping, messaging) in the West. Why someone would believe that, I don't know. I imagine thinking you could also be the owner of it might motivate believing it can happen somewhat.
I suppose the other thesis is that Twitter was horribly mismanaged and can work on far fewer resources to do more if he runs it like Space X or Tesla. That seems plausible to me though in this case it's beyond me why he thinks the actions he's taken will get him there.
> Twitter [...] can work on far fewer resources to do more if he runs it like Space X or Tesla
Even disregarding the content moderation speed run, the technical problems for Tesla and Space X are fundamentally about four things: physics, mathematics, materials technology and applied computer science. Mostly predictable. Twitter is like any other large messaging or information distribution system. Chaotic. Unpredictable. Highly adversarial.
Think about it. In a cloud of atoms, you don't get a sizable fraction trying to game the rest of them. Materials technology may be cruel, but at least it's not actively adversarial. Lithium batteries are volatile and can explode, but they don't do so out of malice.
With Twitter, EM is quickly learning that people are not that different from him. Awful. And dealing with them requires skills and knowledge that the best engineering can't cover.
Incidentally, I think EM is also finding new peers. He is on course to wreak about 40B worth of economic damage in a month, which puts him in the Truss-Kwarteng category. Quite an achievement.
There already exist WeChat equivalents in the West that do "news, media, social media, payments, ordering in restaurants, shopping, messaging", and in fact they even predate WeChat. They're known as Android and iOS.
If uses the point is, if you ask a typical WeChat user to describe what it is, you'll get a similar answer to the android equivalent. From a user point of view, they're comparable.
I don't think I know anyone who does all of their shopping on facebook, or pays their bills on facebook, or uses facebook messaging exclusively, let alone all of those things. Having the feature list isn't the thing, it's getting people to see the app as their one stop shop for all their technology needs. Just having the feature list doesn't replicate WeChat, I don't know why Elon thinks it's possible to replicate.
WeChat solved a problem specific to the Chinese market, given how it's internet market is structured. In the rest of the world, that problem is solved at an OS or browser level. And buying either of those would have been way cheaper than $44 billion
I agree with the first two sentences, but not sure how you think buying a browser or OS would be cheaper. Facebook tried hard and could not do it with a way bigger war chest. Google spent significant money into Android and Chrome (I have worked for both so not impartial).
The thing is with both OS and browser is that they are really long term efforts and I am not sure if Elon could pull that of anymore. For sure Elon from 10 years ago could, but not sure if he has the patience anymore. Same with Zuck, I don't think he has the patience for what he is trying to achieve.
It makes sense if you just fired 50% of your workforce. Although I could never quite figure out what so many people were doing on the product I imagine, in that 50% of staff were some pretty important roles, that now need their hours covered.
I do not considered this fair, ethical or very smart. Just imagine all the tribal knowledge that just vanished. Twitter ought to hope they kept enough of the right infrastructure people around to actually keep the site up.
The way I see it Elon boasted 'hardcore!' .... and most of Twitter's employees called his bluff, now he's screwed.
All this is really because he doesn't really understand his business - what he's selling is access to Twitter's user's attention .... and he's alienated them all because he thinks it's all about technology
> I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter.
He lives off Twitter. His fame and fortune would not be where it’s without Twitter and he very well knows it. You can label that an emotional connection or even personal. I don’t think he out right planned to buy it. One thing after another, he found himself locked into - buying it.
Well, yes. After he presented an acquisition agreement to the Twitter board of directors and presented them with a committed financing package, the Twitter board literally could not refuse Musk’s without spending the rest of their lives in depositions with Twitter public shareholders.
So Twitter of course accepted the deal, Musk (voluntarily) signed the merger agreement, and that was that - he was indeed locked into buying the company (subject to certain conditions - receipt of regulatory approvals, Twitter shareholders approving the merger, stuff like that).
This was not like hitting a lucky streak at the craps table and waking up 12 hours later with a new wife. The decision to purchase was deliberate. Doesn’t mean he didn’t develop buyer’s remorse after - he most certainly did - but the threatened tender offer, the rich, target-friendly merger agreement - this is exactly how you aggressively and deliberately pursue ownership of a big public company.
You know the butterfly effect where one small decision affects tens of thousands of other things? That must have been the day that things were going to well at Tesla, record profits, etc, that Musk got bored and decided he only likes to work under unbearable pressure. So, he made a couple of insulting tweets and now here we are.
I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size.
Immediately starts by threatening advertisers, retweets that story about Pelosi's husband, fires people (probably needed to be done) and then this crazy scheme.
The problem as someone else mentioned is that for Tesla and SpaceX those were really the only two places where you could work if you wanted to do electric cars or space stuff. So they attracted very dedicated people.
Twitter is just web dev stuff and these people can work anywhere. It's not a great time to look for a job but when you get a lot of middle aged people who don't necessarily want to upend their life for their job especially when it was extremely cushy before, well, it's bound to be a problem.
I do think he'll probably pull this off but it's gonna be a pretty miserable road.
"Just web dev" stuff is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It's not like Twitter is just some react code on the cloud. It's been around since 2006 and is essentially a massive realtime platform. I don't think Twitter has any unique secret sauce, but the kind of people who can run a large online platform and dedicated metal really don't exist anymore; and under fire they will either need to run to the cloud (increasing costs) or start dealing with outages.
>I do think he'll probably pull this off
It seems far more likely to me that he ends up selling it to Google or something for pennies. So far, publicly, he hasn't communicated any sort of thesis or plan and most of the head engineering staff has been let go. How long do you think it will take to get a new engineering lead up to speed on 16 years of Twitter infra while also meaningfully transforming the company? His only option at this point is maintaining the app on a shoe-string budget to get "profit", but that seems like a very boring outcome that should have been left to a P/E firm.
>It seems far more likely to me that he ends up selling it to Google or something for pennies.
Although Elon appears to be aggressively driving twitter into the ground, this might be one of the few outcomes which actually increases the certainty of twitter getting killed.
> ends up selling it to Google or something for pennies
I guess it says good things about EM that I could totally see waking up tomorrow to the news that he sold it to Google for $75m and a new pixel phone. I can even see the Tweet: “well that was a disaster.”
For all his faults, he does not seem beholden to consistency.
No matter how big it is it's an order of magnitude less difficult than Cars or Spaceships, don't kid yourself on that. That can be evidenced with how fast they rolled out new features to twitter blue. They made some bad product decisions but the tech side went very fast.
I like that you also came up with the idea that elon will sell for pennies when in reality he's basically succeeded at nearly everything he's done. And he's had massive win after massive win. But you think he's gonna fail here.
It’s why he has succeeded all this time. You don’t get investments by being grounded.
Privacy is regarded highly in the US which means less transparency.
Take for example this:
https://mobile.twitter.com/capitolhunters/status/15933075419...
Shouldn’t confirming Elons university degree be extremely simple?
And if you are treated as a god for so long by your cult on Twitter, media etc then you start believing that you are one and then there is no way back until you get all the way to hell where you finally realize that you are a mere mortal and your huge ego made you a fool of yourself.
I think he's made a major mis-step with twitter though.
SpaceX/Tesla employees work as hard as they do because they believe in the mission of the company. They're willing to just buckle down and do amazing things beyond most people.
Twitter had a lot of normal employees, however, it also already had the true believers in the mission. Those people don't seem to have bought Musk's vision and they're leaving the company. He wanted to get just down to those folks, but I think by and large, they're gone. I don't know that he can recover from that mis-step. He needed to come in, explain his vision and got the true believers onboard before he cleaned house IMHO.
I think more importantly probably all Twitter employees could find a similar job in 20-50 other companies in the area they live in. You cannot beat them up when there are still tons of employers willing to snap them up.
His ego really isn't what you are making it out to be. Has he ever said any of those things? In almost all the interviews he has he never talks about how smart he is, he talks about how good the engineers he works with are.
> I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size.
As an almost ironclad rule, acquisition agreements for big public companies don’t have escape clauses or diligence outs. The buyer does the diligence before they sign the acquisition agreement. His very, very good lawyers at Skadden advised him of this. After it’s signed, it’s really just a question of how quickly the logistics of taking a public company private can be completed.
Musk, for all intents and purposes, bought Twitter back in April. He just didn’t take possession and pay for it until October.
Within the scope of an argument about the job mobility for Twitter engineers, Twitter is "just web dev stuff" or maybe "just planet-scale web dev stuff." The key point is that the skills these engineers have is valuable in many places and EM's behaviour is rapidly driving away everyone who has a reasonable chance of finding work within the next 6-12 months.
WHat I find interesting is the Twitter the business is no more "web stuff" than HN is "web stuff." The real business is on what we might call the product management side, and the central problem to solve when deciding what kind of social media product you have is deciding whether to moderate it, and if so, what you moderate and what you allow.
Even if he miraculously gets enough people motivated work there keeping the lights on and the machine humming, I am with the many people suggesting he has absolutely no idea how to actually run the product side of the business, where decisions like "anybody can rent a blue check for $8 a month" can have drastically negative consequences for the part of your business that sells advertising.
At this moment in time, that side of the business is extremely messy, and it isn't an engineering problem, it's a people problem.
Elon does not strike me as a people person, nor does he appear to be interested in delegating the most important role in the company—the person who decides what Twitter's product is—to anyone with competence in this area.
You are right that it isn't "just web dev", but at the same time the rest of the statement still holds. There's lots and lots of large-scale (mostly-)web services, and running one certainly isn't that groundbreaking anymore. If you really want to work on one, it doesn't have to be Twitter.
I imagine theres lots of groundbreaking stuff to work on at Twitter. Lots of opportunities to apply AI, do cool distributed systems research, build specialized hardware to optimize video, build new types of databases, apply computational social science (all things facebook does fyi). Its far far more than "just web dev". Now you can just stop working on your products and just hope the website stays alive but not sure its a good plan in the long run
Yeah they have problems that most companies don't, and a scale that most companies don't. But, web dev and scaling is not nearly as hard as car manufacturing or rocket design. Both of which are far more complex, also have a ton of software and people's lives are on the line.
> I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size.
This was not a mistake. He was seeing that his offer to buy twitter was not taken seriously. Understandably the board felt he will flake out. He wanted to show he won't flake out. The way he could demonstrate that was by binding his own hands.
So he went to his lawyers and asked them to write an offer he can't back out from. And then he got what he asked for.
Looks like EM is riven between "make Twitter an open platform for all opinions" and "burn Twitter down". Both good aims, but a mixed strategy does not lead anywhere good.
This is a completely absurd plan from one person. Especially as egoistic as Musk. He never wanted it to be a free speech platform. Just more pleasing to his opinions
>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore".
There is no opportunity to "go hardcore" for the kind of devs that build greenfield crap at lightning speed and leave spaghetti in their wake.
Elon appears to intend to slice and dice his way to profitability like a textbook MBA. In order to support that there is opportunity for architects, engineers and process specialists who are skilled at hacking existing stuff together to make square pegs fit in round holes well enough to work and with minimal expenditure of engineering man hours. There are few of these people because it's not a skillset that the traditional software engineering trade really values and pushes people toward and fewer still who fit that category and want to work 50+hr weeks, and fewer still because pre-Elon Twitter isn't the kind of place these people thrive and so most would have self-selected out.
Crypto. Twitter as an ad agency business has not much room to expand. You just have to look at the team EM assembled. EM himself was paypal founder. Many others on his investment teams are related to payment as well...even Jack has his square. Think about it, tweeter turn into like wechat with built in payment wallet especially crypto wallets managing like an exchange by a paypal founder who happen to have good access to government relationship. With expected tsunami of retrenchments coming especially for IT sectors, EM can afford to replace entire current Twitter engineers several time over - cheaper and more efficient. Most of those tweeters tech staff seems to be very obvilious of the incoming tech layoffs. FB along expected to let go about 30K (at least 2 more rounds in 2023). Google doing their 10K. Netflix and MS expected to hit that number as well before end of 2023. The labour market will be full of very good devs out of job. Can see that? When one is desperate with tons of bills to pay, no matter how much one despise EM, one will swallow the pride and work for him. Remember EM has access to vast amount of economic data (see who his friends are). He knows what is going on and how much leverage on his side vs entire tech community. It isnt lose-lose situation...mostly rank and yank situation done with maximum drama.
Not a fan of Elon but it does look like Twitter had some serious problems that did need to be fixed. Like not having plans for dealing with cold-boot situations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593122
This was more to reduce headcount but to increase drama, which in turn makes you visit Twitter more, which in turn leads to more ad impressions and money for Twitter. As EM tweeted, more people have visited Twitter now than ever before. I just deleted my account when I understood what was going on.
They've probably already lost 95% of the 'hardcore' people. If you're good, and EM's threatening to fire everyone, then you get another job. The people who've stayed are presumably makeweights and time-servers.
> It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter.
Yet another one of his relationships burned down and this time his ex is with a trans lady. One of his kids went to court to kick him out of her life while doing the paperwork for her name change. He's been a shitty husband and a shitty father, but instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a decent psychologist he's decided that "woke twitter" are to blame because they kicked a transphobic comedian off the site, and he's spiraled out of control since then.
He'd literally rather burn $44 billion dollars than admit that he has shortcomings. Or face a background check on his alleged university credentials.
>It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter.
The entire and obvious and openly stated point of Musk buying Twitter was to reinstate Trump, and re-inflict his regular unhinged sociopathic tweets and lies and misinformation and calls to violence and bullying and hate speech and racism upon everyone in the world again, just when we were all getting used to enjoying not hearing from him every single fucking day and the middle of the night.
There's no other rational explanation, and although that obvious explanation may sound completely irrational, so is Musk, and it is still the real reason, and the inextricable consequence, just as predicted by Occam's Razor, and foretold by Musk's own words.
There's nothing bewildering about it at all, so stop acting so surprised, and pretending he changed his mind after what he said so emphatically and unambiguously.
It's not like it's a secret, or contested. He openly announced it. When people show you who they are and what they'll do, believe them.
>"I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump," Musk said. "I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice."
>Musk added that Trump's ban was "morally wrong and flat-out stupid."
Those damn pens. They are making some healthy people lose their shit when used a bit too heavily. I'm worried about those with PTSD and other trauma being "prescribed" this stuff, honestly. THC vape pen use needs to be studied in-depth. Dangerous.
> What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.
Have you ever used Twitter?
To someone who has used Twitter in the past weeks this reads like deliberate trolling.
Twitter was absolutely terrible to use and the pace of noticible change within days/weeks under Elon is mind blowing to me. He's clearly going fast with things like getting rid of (shadow-)banning for no apparent reason, getting rid of banning anything of a certain political flavor, making Twitter faster (both in browser as well as on Android), getting rid of fake scammer accounts who deliberately impersonated famous people and companies to scam people, getting rid of bots and spam which where a HUGE problem (still are until the transition to verified is done) and so on.
I mean getting rid of politically flavored sensorship alone will have a massive impact globally for something like Twitter. That alone was obviously very terrible to many people before Musk.
PS: since you said you don't understand what his vision is. My best guess: it's to create a platform that competes with click-bait sponsored propaganda journalism. In the form of citizen journalism on Twitter. I think it could work and I also think there's a huge need for it as traditional journalism is dead in my opinion.
I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars.
It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.