Love or hate Elon, he could definitely have an impact on the tech industry.
In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought, that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship, and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
Too early to tell any of those things. The layoffs on sales might make the business worse in the mid term. The layoffs on product and engineering might make the product worse, even obsolete in the mid term. There is absolutely no way to tell if light handed moderation will work. There is no way to know if the service revenue makes any difference compared to ad revenue.
You are wishful thinking the best case scenario for Musk decisions. It is just as likely, in my opinion, that in a year or two the worst scenario will be the outcome of Musk tenure.
The worst case scenario, in my view, is something like the revenue never recovering to pre-acquisition levels (which weren’t great already), the product not having any significantly valuable new feature, and suffering from long outages and ended up being sold for ~$10bi.
Overstaffing a company doesn't mean it makes great products too, it tends to create more bureaucracy, deep hierarchy structure, and pointless products (some companies putting more effort on these products then focusing on their best ones...).
It's extremely difficult to find the right balance, almost impossible when the company is sky rocketing, like Twitter was.
Trying to analyze it from a business man perspective, I see that Elon's trying to find that balance and I see that as positive. He can be wrong, things can go wrong, but sometimes you must make this kind of decision, take the consequences, and adjust to fix what you broke.
That's a really good question that I think is also too early to see. Certainly Twitter lost a lot of developer confidence, I think people's perception of the service has changed. But does that matter? I'm not sure.
A bunch of 3rd-party devs jumped ship, and it's tempting to say "they'll remember that" if Twitter tries to lure them back,but we don't know yet if that's true or not. A bunch of advertisers jumped ship, but they could come back. The cost is that users look at these decisions and trust the platform less.
But we don't know the cost of that cost, if that makes any sense. We don't know if this ends up sparking a death spiral or if everyone complains about the decisions and then forgets about it by the end of 2023.
He also exposed that radical leftists executives were colluding with US govt to promote propaganda, censor topics and fundamentally manipulate election outcomes, through established journalists.
There has been light to no coverage from mainstream press as it doesn't advance the left's current agenda.
The “exposure” has been underwhelming, with plenty of evidence that twitter fulfilled the wishes of republicans, including modifying their own moderation policy wrt xenophobia to accommodate Trump tweets.
Or … none of those could end up being true. I remember a lot of projection about how Elon was going to restore Twitter to the ‘early days’, and none of that has come to pass either.
I’d rather judge on things that have actually happened than have to deal with a new set of forward looking projections about what could happen every few months.
I remember having a bit of hope that an easy win could be he making changes to regain trust from developers and make Twitter a more dynamic platform with a more open API. Turns out, he did exactly the opposite and led to even more distrust from third party developers.
It adds nothing to reply to someone saying that the changes at twitter could be good and influential by saying "but they could also be bad." It's already implied in the could.
> I’d rather judge on things that have actually happened than have to deal with a new set of forward looking projections about what could happen every few months.
If you're leaving all prediction and forecasting to other people, why complain when they do it?
I'm not pointing out that they could be bad — I'm pointing out that there's a good track record of them not happening at all, particularly when it comes to Musk.
He may very well prove that you can make a social media service more profitable by making it more harmful to users and damaging to the community in general.
I'm not sure selling sausages made out of sawdust is a big win or even that interesting of a business solution. It's a short-cut that most companies could take if they were to chuck their ethics out of the window (and possibly be willing to break the law).
But if it makes money a large swath of the tech industry will hail it as an innovation and follow suit. Which is kind of sad. And also, at the end of the day, why we need laws against selling sausages made out of sawdust.
> He may very well prove that you can make a social media service more profitable
I'm not sure that anyone should be looking at Twitter and thinking, "this is a good strategy for making things more profitable." Is Twitter making more money? They were already losing money before, and my understanding is that post-transition a bad situation has turned into a crisis.
What are the odds that Twitter ends up being seen as something to emulate in business and not as a cautionary tale? I mean, never say never, but the impression I've gotten about Twitter's financial prospects is not optimistic.
People are actually going to start arguing that Twitter and other social media were healthy up until he bought Twitter just to spite bad meme man, aren't they?
> He may very well prove that you can make a social media service more profitable by making it more harmful to users and damaging to the community in general.
By removing the very politically-biased censorship he already did a very healthy move for the whole world.
The first link is just straight speculation and bad reporting as it shows the authors disdain and bias for the subject matter. The second link is even worse beginning with an editorialization of “thin skinned” the whole rest of the article is moot. We can’t know if any of it is accurate if the author starts off with such bias against the very subject of the article. The third link has nothing to do with Elon. It’s a low profile block of an account that was breaking multiple laws. Not sure what you expect there.
He did but we see both the liberal and autocratic governments of the world lament that they wish Elon would be open to government censorship. Now, some people don’t want to have this be acknowledged but it’s what we’re seeing.
>>In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought
The notifications feature on Android App is already broken and hasn't been fixed since like eternity now. Messenger notifications don't show up either. It takes hours, at times even days for the notifications to show up. There are times when the messages are not properly ordered. They just removed 2FA. Messaging was a nice way to talk to people of common interests, and that's barely working these days.
The app/website are randomly down and you often have to scream on Twitter to get it up and running.
Nothing is really working in Twitter at this point in time, It could get fixed eventually but the strategy has clearly backfired.
Perhaps people underestimate what sort of effort it takes to run operations of that magnitude. If you have a $50 billion site. It is not really a bad idea to pay a few people to keep something like notifications and messenger running. The sheer amount of losses in terms of user trust, experience and eventually money numbers themselves would far exceed expenses paid in salaries.
Twitter had many profitable quarters before Musk bought it, and lots of cash on hand with a lot of runway. It was not dying in any meaningful sense. His changes have only destroyed profitability by substantially reducing advertising revenue.
The company had some profitable years pre-covid, and Elon's first action was to nearly double their debt _and_ slash their income.
He may have done far worse things as well but that depends on your opinion of his product/feature changes. But the additional debt he has saddled them with and the revenue he deprived Twitter of aren't really arguable, and his attempts to cut costs by short term slash and burns don't make anywhere near the dent needed to offset them.
With 40 billion dollars on the line? I think it’d make more sense to think through things and evolve it over time rather than shooting from the hip constantly. Morale at Twitter must be even lower than Amazon at this point.
There's probably some pyschopaths that enjoy the chaos and power vacuums.
There are a lot that don't want to be there. A lot returned out of necessity. Mostly from h1b visa stuff and avoiding being deported. Or getting a new job isn't as easy right now as some think it is. Teams are tiny so people are over worked and elon is making demands that require people to over work and do things immediately.
To my understanding most people there are moreso hanging on because either they have nothing else lined up or because their H1B visa is going to be automatically revoked if they quit Twitter, which would force them out of the country with no grace period.
Reports from inside the company suggest a rather grim attitude. Musk has fired several engineers, even those directly aligned with his vision for the site, often over fairly minor errors and mistakes. There's no sense of loyalty to either the company, the product, the boss or even the vision, Musk has basically eroded all of that.
Musk has been treating the employees as completely expendable. He fired one of his last two principal engineers for daring to suggest that the reason he had less views was just because people weren't into his antics anymore. Then he forced 80 employees off of their current tasks just after the Superbowl to artificially boost his own priority in the algorithm over the weekend because Joe Biden got more views on his Superbowl tweet than Musk did.
I gave an example of someone who doesn't need an H1B visa and who has been involved in the tech scene for a long time. Someone who could likely get another job relatively easy.
People want to find doom and gloom, but the reality is that if Musk wants priorities changed, he is the boss and should be able to do so. 'Forced' is a pretty strong word given that he's paying their salaries and people should be able to switch tasks if the boss wants it.
Well sure. Musk risked a lot more than that and almost lost Tesla on the Model3 ramp. He risked a lot more than that on reusable rockets, he's risking a lot more than that on Starlink & Starship.
If you want to do something extremely impactful, you've gotta take big risks.
Playing the safe game is pretty mundane and boring, and to be honest it's not a very exciting way to live, and not a very fast way to improve something.
he's not the first to even do this... Snapchat added a premium tier with actual (small) perks way ahead of others, and they have 2.5M subs for it. telegram did it too. People only focus on musk cause he's loud but he's following the trends of the industry, he's not inventing the ideas from thin air. Remember when he said he'd make twitter a "super app"? kinda like how IG, wechat, Snapchat and others have been for a while.
FB was losing money due to Apple clamping down on privacy policy. It should not surprise anyone that FB would look for different revenue stream. IMHO FB had no choice, and I wouldn't be surprised if their introduce other paid products.
I wish FB would have a free verification service so everyone can be verified...so when I look through comments I can filter by such.
Not sure your point...if I lost 20% of my salary I'm gonna find a way to make more money which may include changing employer. If you don't mind parting with a 20% loss every year, I'll let you know where to venmo me some money.
>In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought
Fact: The site has repeatedly had significant technical issues since he took over, with repeated down time, massive waves of complaints from top users about flakey behaviour.
Fiction:
> that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship
Fact: His first move at Twitter resulted in a collapse in ad revenue and massive stock market shocks for companies as impersonators announced new policies on the platform. Since then he has taken far more overarching, far more capricious, moderation decisions than the previous management.
Fiction:
>and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
Fact: Twitter revenue is in freefall. The revenue from Twitter Blue is entirely inconsequential and the loss of ad revenue has completely eclipsed it. It is an open secret Musk is fundraising to cover his enormous losses.
I think this tells us one very clear thing that we've known about the industry for a while. It operates on vibes not facts. Does everyone love the idea of a subscription based model rather than Ads? Sure! People were talking about that for years before Musk turned up. Does that mean Musk has succeeded? Fuck no! He's made an absolute mess of it. Welcome to Twitter Blue, perks include everyone on twitter thinking you're a mug for paying Elon Musk $8 for your brand new blue badge.
I have heard through the grapevine that a lot of companies in SF/SV were hoarding employees they did not need to prevent competitors from getting them. Elon Era Twitter seems like a confirmation of that (or at least a data point).
A lot of people thought Twitter would collapse immediately due to all the cuts. Granted, as you wrote, it isn't as good as it was, so he probably cut too much.
Again, it's been a theory for a long time that top companies like Google were hoarding talent, but there just isn't any evidence for it. Not least, because if that were the plan Google is doing a shockingly poor job of it. People are getting confused by the timing, but two things happened. 1: Elon Musk got angry that the Babylon Bee got kicked off twitter and became so online that he burnt $45Bn pursuing an unhinged vendetta. Separately to that interest rates suddenly went from a historic low to shooting up - the result being these high growth companies saw their forward returns crushed and their stock values cut in half, so the equation of "invest for growth" vs. "Return cash" tipped massively. It's easy to conflate these two things, but they really have nothing to do with each other, it just so happened that Musk managed to time it incredibly badly. Big Tech is responding to macro trends, Elon Musk is personally accusing his own employees of being pedophiles, there's a slight difference.
I think Elon started the ‘disk defragmentation’ process for employee efficiency and other companies are seeing the benefit. There is a lot of slack in tech companies. When staff have time to unironically have video shorts on how pampered they are and how little work they get to do, there is a lot of ‘defragmentation’ opportunities.
Companies were afraid to be first but Elon plus the new malaise economy gives them the right condition to follow suit and start it.
Those companies haven't really trimmed back to even where they were at the start of 2022 yet. They over hired a little, but nobody is going to cut 50% or more like Musk did. Those useless moonshot products they're "wasting money" on sometimes turn out to be the next ChatGPT. Of course, ChatGPT is a bit of empty hype, but there is an enormous amount of money to be made. Can you imagine if Google just had nothing like that ready because they were too afraid to accidentally over hire?
The most unexpected angle to me was how people who just do their job become the prime targets to get rid of. If you want promotion or simply for people to stop laughing at you behind your back you have to drop your productivity way way down to average - ideally below.
No. As I mentioned, leaving your feelings about him personally aside, he is challenging the model for social media and now having the approach cloned by the market leader.
I hated the moderations/censorship on these platforms and I dislike the adtech/tracking business model so he has my support on both of those angles.
Meta also appear to be bundling in customer support which is probably my third objection to big tech. So I’ll thank Elon for that one too.
What he has demonstrated so far is that you don't need those things if your goal is to lose money, and you can stay alive a little longer in those situations by simply ignoring several laws wholesale.
He still has yet to demonstrate any other outcomes than making twitter vastly less profitable.
You would love mastodon then. There is no censorship at all, but at the same time everyone is free to ignore you either personally or for their whole instance. Best of both worlds.
No one can stop you from finding or starting an instance with your values. Its the same kind of freedom the copy machine or the home word processor gives.
No, it doesn't let you be a prick with someone elses resources. They have no obligation to listen or amplify you.
Perhaps people's expectations of free speech are a little greedy?
You seem to be confused. No one on mastodon can stop you from speaking. They can just choose not to listen. Censorship would be stopping you from speaking. As long as you're not breaking any laws, no one is going to shut you down and prevent you from being on the network (eg, your hosting company shutting you down). All you stand to lose is a generous system administrator doing the work of staying online for you for free.
Is free speech in your mind something someone automatically has obligation to share? Thats forced, not free.
In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought, that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship, and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
All positive developments for the industry IMO.