It seems Elon Musk has bought a company for $44 billion despite thinking it fundamentally unsound, and with about 50% excess staff. That company is Twitter. This Tweet has the details of the staff cull to come:
This is extraordinary. Twitter is a people and not a tech business. Let's be honest, the tech is not that impressive except for its scale.
Everything else is about people. The people who run it, for sure. The people who write the content, most certainly. And the fact that advertisers think they are worth directing comment at, which I simply ignore.
But what it is not about is tech engineering.
Nor is it about unregulated spaces, where those advertisers definitely do not want to appear.
Will Musk's incomprehension first cull Twitter and then his financial empire? I fear it will.
I will regret losing Twitter if that happens: it has overall been a force for good. But I wonder how long it can survive.
I think the fall may be very quick. The advertisers will kill it by pulling out.
I am waiting to see what happens to decide my own next step.
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Science fiction has seen the birth of people like Musk for years. Of course he has to make people redundant because he’s overpaid for it hasn’t he because the banks have profited hugely I bet.
It shows you how we destroy wealth in society though doesn’t it and how a few profit?
Perhaps the BBC could do its own version? Of course this will not happen in Tory-run UK, but is its something for Liebore to think about. Ditto the EU – no reason why there could not be a euro-twitter – after all competition is good – no?
Musk has had two sucesses: Pay-Pal and Tesla. Perhaps he now thinks he is infallible?
Fascinating idea
The EU are already warning him
Starlink is very good technology and SpaceX are doing things much cheaper than Nasa, ESA and their competitors have managed, so he’s got a very good record where hard tech firms are the focus. Tesla is ludicrously overvalued given the number of cars they actually manufacture but they have pushed the envelope, so to speak, in certain areas and have pushed other companies to follow into the electric car market which is undoubtedly vital. Truth be told, I assumed they’d have been bought out by one of the really big manufacturers by now, but as long as Musk can surf along on the back of the value of his shareholdings, there’s no need for him to do this.
I agree entirely with Richard that the twitter takeover is a massive mistake. I think he’s backed himself into a corner with his trash talk which attempted to force down the value of the shares and that’s backfired on him. He’s now got no choice but to follow through, regardless of how much it harms the country. He’s wealthy enough that he doesn’t need to care and will never admit to error.
Musk has had three great successes. In 1999 – then just 27 – he got $22m from Compaq for his 7% of a four year old dotcom called Zip2.
What does a 27 year old with millions in the bank do? Well, he started again.
In 2002 – aged 30 – he got £175m for his 12% of PayPal when it was acquired by eBay shortly after it floated (his interest came from a merger of his 1999 startup X.com with another online payment provider, Confinity). Not bad for three years of work.
His c.$200 billion wealth today – down from a peak of over $300 billion – comes partly from his stake in SpaceX which he founded in 2002, but mainly from his early investment in Tesla in 2004. Others founded Tesla in 2003, but Musk took control in 2008.
He has sold billions of dollars of Tesla stock for cash in recent years – quite sensible given the valuations – and much of that has funded the Twitter acquisition.
You have to admit, he has been a serial entrepreneur, and been spectacularly successful several times (some ventures not so much yet – The Boring Company and its hyperloops?). Like most wealthy people, he seems to attribute his success to his own genius, not luck.
Mike there are a number of PayPal founders, one of whom is the odious Peter Thiel.
Any thoughts on where you will relocate to when Twitter goes the same way as Punternet and Myspace?
No idea as yet
There are always independent, non-oligarch social media platforms. Time to support Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org).
I imagine the obvious successor will be Dorsey’s Bluesky platform, still in Beta.
Its an obvious point but there are so many better ways of spending $44bn if Musk is wondering what to do with it. Climate change for starters.
He put a marker down when he retweeted the conspiracy theory about the attack on Pelosi’s husband. Ive stopped using it – but an alternative would be welcome.
While I agree with the thrust of your post, a lot of of great engineering has happened at twitter. You might be interested to know the Bootstrap framework that your own website uses was created at twitter, for instance.
Fair enough
I think the strength of twitter is not it’s tech, but it’s user base and the sheer number of social interactions between strangers that it provides. About the only thing Musk is right about is that there are far too many bots on there, and they’ve not done enough about them.
Clearly cutting half the staff is a deeply arrogant and uninformed thing to do – he can’t have any idea of the value of particular people to the company. There’s bound to be some engineers keeping things running smoothly, and I imagine will just stop running those fix scripts on the way out of the door, given how badly he is treating loyal employees. Expect some unreliability in the coming months.
The question is whether people want to be on a “free for all hellscape” as he described it. I suspect not. Like you say, that will put off advertisers, which will then hurt the bottom line and provide a feedback mechanism that will scupper such plans. There is as of course the matter of the law too of course.
It wouldn’t be hard to create a clone of twitter – there are many. The only hard thing is getting the critical mass required to build the social graphs required for it to be popular. That could be achieved by appropriate celebrity endorsements though I imagine.
I’m pondering Mastodon. It looks a bit offputting but I have a techy friend who is on it so I’ll have a chat with him about it.