-
Want to remove ads? Register an account and login to see fewer ads, and become a Supporting Member to remove almost all ads.
Elon & Twitter
- Thread starter Buckminster
- Start date
- Status
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
I’ve never heard of a tech startup with debt. The startup I worked for was funded by an angel investor and then a couple rounds of venture capital. The first six months I worked without pay. I can confirm that it’s a great way to work hard and make a lot of money. But I didn’t commit to it without knowing exactly how much equity I was getting.
I didn't know one way or another but "Alex Cohen" has a blue check (we all know how valuable/meaningful that is now) and it's back to my point about free speech absolutism, the blue check and Elon's stance on "citizen journalism" like .
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
I’m pretty sure Elon wants great engineers, not adequate ones.
Even though Elon’s takeover of Twitter is a value incinerator of legendary proportions I have a lot of confidence that he can assemble and lead a team to rapidly rebuild the technical stack.
There really is no justification to have an employee base of 7500 for what Twitter does. If even half we’re focused on product engineering that’s probably a couple of thousand too many.
Unfortunately he has probably lost all his best sales people already. Like top engineers in the Bay they have rolling stacks of new job offers.
So let’s see how fast the payment expansion occurs.
AlanSubie4Life
Efficiency Obsessed Member
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
Interesting. I read the “citizen journalism” as sarcastic. Also that’s not a media source.
But yeah some media were fooled by Ligma Johnson.
I’m looking forward to seeing how Elon is going to turn Twitter into an accurate source of news.
I agree.
I don't think Musk will have trouble attracting great engineers though. He's got literally hundreds (thousands) of great engineers working for him at SpaceX and Tesla.
Pretty sure he knows how to identify and retain great talent.
I think Twitter needs a new product to sell first. The payment expansion is likely going to be at least a few months down the road. Though he is probably already working on it.
ZenRockGarden
Active Member
Sorry - due to Elon's personal design change decisions we've got "verified" people running around with fake names and no vetting. We told him it was a bad idea, but I'm sure since you know he can do no wrong, you'll sort it out for us soon
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
There’s a feature in some Twitter clients to turn the blue check to a clown for people who paid $8.
You can also go the profile and click the blue check and it will tell you.
And this applies to what how? Just spewing random nonsense I guess? Too much effort to look at the user account to see that it actually says on the account splash that it's a parody account?Sorry - due to Elon's personal design change decisions we've got "verified" people running around with fake names and no vetting. We told him it was a bad idea, but I'm sure since you know he can do no wrong, you'll sort it out for us soon
Who exactly is he impersonating?
ZenRockGarden
Active Member
I did no spew any random unvetted nonsense - that honor belongs to others. I'm just pointing out that your dear leader's design decisions are the exact specific root cause of the confusion. You think he's brilliant in the social media and moderation space - you own the results.
Raisin45567
Member
Exactly. Everyone here wants Tesla to succeed.
The problem with that approach is that if entire mission-critical teams drop down to zero remaining employees, you no longer have enough staff to even keep the lights on long enough to hire new employees. Given that some of the now-defunct teams are the ones responsible for keeping their systems up and running, and given that these things generally require some amount of maintenance just to keep them alive, I'd give them a couple of weeks before enough systems go down to put them below the minimum threshold where things start to break badly. One month tops.
I'm going to be uncharacteristically blunt here. In all my life, I've never seen a single leader wreck a company so utterly and completely in such a short time. Short of offering the remaining few hundred people equal percentages of the company that comes out the other side, I'd be amazed if anybody in their right minds stays unless they either aren't qualified to find another job somewhere else or haven't had time to do so yet. And you can safely assume that the people in the latter category are only in that category in the very short term.
My advice to Musk is this: resign. Immediately. Announce that you are stepping down, and that someone else is taking over. Announce that they will be reaching out to employees to figure out who to bring back, and that you will not be making any further operational decisions at the company. Or wait a week and sell the company to Facebook, Amazon, or Google for $100, because at that point, the only remaining value in the company will come from the domain name or from selling people's personal information to the highest bidder.
That said, to Mr. Musk, I'll give you $1,000 bucks for the whole company right now and take over as CEO and owner, but only if you reach out to me before 5:00 P.M. Pacific Time on Friday, November 18th, 2022.
ZenRockGarden
Active Member
I hear you. I think they may be able to keep some of the wheels on, but it's going to be an unholy mess for a while, best case.
And even if you believe this idea that it was necessary to gut 90% of the company to reset the culture... doing that basically cuts twitter down to just a reference design, a brand name and maybe a userbase if it can be saved. I don't believe the Twitter brand is worth tens of billions of dollars, so if this was what had to happen, then as I've pointed out - the guy with the great idea for a better Twitter should have just made one from scratch, built whatever culture he wanted in it, and then had $40B to spend on growing the thing.
Twitter depends on advertisers for its revenue, very much unlike Tesla and SpaceX. Apparently the major advertisers on Twitter are heading for the hills right now and are very unlikely to return in a hurry.
If I were a creditor who has financed the Twitter deal, then I would get quite nervous right now and possibly instruct my legal team to check if there is the possibility to pin personal liability on Musk, in case of insolvency of Twitter.
Obviously this site here is very US-centric, but I would like to add that Trumpian style and politics has a slim fanbase in Western Europe and Musk's recent behaviour and political leanings are not positive for his perception by the public here, to put it cautiously.
If I were a creditor who has financed the Twitter deal, then I would get quite nervous right now and possibly instruct my legal team to check if there is the possibility to pin personal liability on Musk, in case of insolvency of Twitter.
Obviously this site here is very US-centric, but I would like to add that Trumpian style and politics has a slim fanbase in Western Europe and Musk's recent behaviour and political leanings are not positive for his perception by the public here, to put it cautiously.
There are so many people convinced that Elon is going to save Twitter, after all he's been in tight spots before. Nobody is perfect and even the most capable people have failures. Einstein was hailed as one of the greatest Physicists in history but he was dead wrong about Quantum Mechanics.
Elon has succeeded in the past by moving into markets that had weak competition or no competition and being a first mover disrupter. With Zip2 nobody was doing internet maps, with Paypal/x.com there were only two competitors in online payments and they merged, Tesla was the only company making attractive electric cars in a market full of compliance cars, SpaceX brought 21st century tech to an industry dominated by governments using 1960s technology.
Twitter is an established company in a very crowded market. There are several established social media companies and lots of start ups looking for an opening. It's also proven to be a fickle market with users moving on to something else if a platform gets stale. Once users move on, they don't tend to come back.
Customer service is much more important in social media than his other companies. SpaceX's customers are governments and large companies. Tesla has consumer customers, but this forum is full of complaints about their poor customer service. They are only still afloat because the existing technology in the hands of consumers is still better than anything else available, but that could change in the next few years. Paypal was a customer driven service too, but they kicked Elon out of the CEO job and sold the company out from under him in part because he was so difficult to work with.
Paypal was the only game in town for online payment at that time so it was able to stay afloat despite Elon's problems dealing with others. Twitter is in a well developed market.
His secret sauce to success is to boil something down to the basic principles and build up from there. That's how SpaceX and Tesla became great. It looks to me like he bought Twitter on a whim and decided he was a genius and he would just be able to wing it.
Elon bought Twitter on a leveraged buy out. Companies rarely survive those kinds of acquisitions. They are usually used by corporate raiders intent on stripping all the value out of a company and letting it die. The interest on the loans is around $100 million a month. A couple of posts about the financial trouble
Elon Musk reportedly set to cut $1 billion in Twitter infrastructure costs
I didn't read through all of today's thread, but Twitter had a large number of employees quit Thursday leaving the company without enough people to keep the lights on.
This isn't the first bad financial move he's made. He had Tesla invest in Bitcoin near the top of the market and it's now about 1/3 the price.
Elon has been acting increasingly erratic the last couple of years. He was accusing that diver of being a pedophile, invested in Bitcoin at the wrong time, declared that he would only vote for Republicans (the party dead set on killing everything Tesla stands for), and buying Twitter on a whim.
My partner thinks he's an unmedicated impulsive ADD type who is doing crazy stuff. Her ex-husband was like that, he just didn't have billions to blow on whims. She has ADD from a drug reaction so she knows the animal, though she's more the inattentive type thankfully for both of us. She has very good impulse control.
He's going to bankrupt Twitter and have to sell a bunch of Tesla stock to cover his loan guarantees. Tesla stock is probably going to tank and stay there for a while.
It's time the Tesla board found someone else to be CEO. The company doesn't need an entrepreneur right now, they need a boring, steady engineer. A Tim Cook type.
Elon is likely going to get sued for tanking the stock. Tesla might get sued too, though they might wriggle out of the suit.
Elon has succeeded in the past by moving into markets that had weak competition or no competition and being a first mover disrupter. With Zip2 nobody was doing internet maps, with Paypal/x.com there were only two competitors in online payments and they merged, Tesla was the only company making attractive electric cars in a market full of compliance cars, SpaceX brought 21st century tech to an industry dominated by governments using 1960s technology.
Twitter is an established company in a very crowded market. There are several established social media companies and lots of start ups looking for an opening. It's also proven to be a fickle market with users moving on to something else if a platform gets stale. Once users move on, they don't tend to come back.
Customer service is much more important in social media than his other companies. SpaceX's customers are governments and large companies. Tesla has consumer customers, but this forum is full of complaints about their poor customer service. They are only still afloat because the existing technology in the hands of consumers is still better than anything else available, but that could change in the next few years. Paypal was a customer driven service too, but they kicked Elon out of the CEO job and sold the company out from under him in part because he was so difficult to work with.
Paypal was the only game in town for online payment at that time so it was able to stay afloat despite Elon's problems dealing with others. Twitter is in a well developed market.
His secret sauce to success is to boil something down to the basic principles and build up from there. That's how SpaceX and Tesla became great. It looks to me like he bought Twitter on a whim and decided he was a genius and he would just be able to wing it.
Elon bought Twitter on a leveraged buy out. Companies rarely survive those kinds of acquisitions. They are usually used by corporate raiders intent on stripping all the value out of a company and letting it die. The interest on the loans is around $100 million a month. A couple of posts about the financial trouble
Elon Musk reportedly set to cut $1 billion in Twitter infrastructure costs
I didn't read through all of today's thread, but Twitter had a large number of employees quit Thursday leaving the company without enough people to keep the lights on.
This isn't the first bad financial move he's made. He had Tesla invest in Bitcoin near the top of the market and it's now about 1/3 the price.
Elon has been acting increasingly erratic the last couple of years. He was accusing that diver of being a pedophile, invested in Bitcoin at the wrong time, declared that he would only vote for Republicans (the party dead set on killing everything Tesla stands for), and buying Twitter on a whim.
My partner thinks he's an unmedicated impulsive ADD type who is doing crazy stuff. Her ex-husband was like that, he just didn't have billions to blow on whims. She has ADD from a drug reaction so she knows the animal, though she's more the inattentive type thankfully for both of us. She has very good impulse control.
He's going to bankrupt Twitter and have to sell a bunch of Tesla stock to cover his loan guarantees. Tesla stock is probably going to tank and stay there for a while.
It's time the Tesla board found someone else to be CEO. The company doesn't need an entrepreneur right now, they need a boring, steady engineer. A Tim Cook type.
Elon is likely going to get sued for tanking the stock. Tesla might get sued too, though they might wriggle out of the suit.
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
If you worked in Cali for 6 months without pay, that was squarely against labor laws. And yes, I have personal experience with a startup regarding this. Cali law is VERY clear on this, employees cannot work for "juts equity" in a company.
A couple of years ago he did a presentation at the Web Summit conference in Lissabon. Automated driving was all the rage then and a lot of car manufacturers had presentation on the topic. Some presentations concluded that automated driving was just around the corner, others concluded that we would never see it in our lifetimes. I was particularly interested in George Hotz’s presentation. I’ve never seen anybody be so overconfident as George Hotz in that presentation. He sounded like he never wrote a production application and didn’t know what it means to bring a software product in a sellable and supportable state. My conclusion was that he would spend some time at comma.ai until he got bored and would then leave, leaving behind an unsupportable mess, and probably not even that.
Guess what. He left comma.ai and there’s no sign that comma.ai has built anything remotely resembling a product.
It’s the kind of person who is probably good at hacking through somebody else’s massive codebase and make some minor changes. I wouldn’t want him in my team as he seems to be a person you can’t cooperate with. I’m very glad that Elon didn’t hire him a couple of years ago, and hope Elon doesn’t hire him for Twitter.
- Status
