Per the article I posted earlier, if he doesn’t start taking seriously his legal obligations under European data protection rules, the national GDPR authorities will cheerfully queue up to take him apart financially. He ain’t exploiting shit in this part of the world.
-
There is an element of luck, especially regarding timing, in business acumen.
-
Things change over time. People may have had more or less knowledge previously. The knowledge may be more or less specific to a given situation. People might be more or less impulsive over time, or playing to an audience, sort of like Tesla’s advertising strategy.
-
People often rely on advice which varies in quality. Part of the problem may be a failure to delegate. Maybe he felt he had more leverage than he did. Bad timing for any tech purchase, the sector is having issues.
-
Musk has done some challenging things and done well in some areas. Twitter seems an exception, but concluding there is no knowledge seems false.
-
Musk’s biggest problem was lack of a plan to find a way to profitability, long a concern with Twitter. Verification caused problems, but if everyone paid eight bucks this would result in gains of under $40m. And full adoption is unlikely. It might have been prudent to know who does what jobs and avoid irritating advertisers. But I have no expertise about this.
-
Maybe he can find a silver lining. Maybe he learned something.
Musk’s biggest problem from where I’m sitting was failing to learn about how social media works before making a major investment in one of the largest social media platforms in the world. Pure hubris.
Here’s what I was looking for.
Pertains specifically to the free speech issue, but anyone buying fucking Twitter should know at least this much about what to expect. The lack of preparation is really what gets me here.
That is an awesome find there @Spice_Weasel. Thank you!
I like how we can map the various slogans to SDMB’s policies. Especially at final level 20. 
That is business management 101. That’s what I find so hard to fathom. I’ve seen first-year MBA study groups that could have done better.
This last part is going to be nigh impossible, as long as that owner is Musk. He thrives on telling people how smart he is, and about how amazing the companies that he owns are – he won’t shut up about Tesla, or SpaceX, and now that he owns Twitter, he’ll keep tweeting about it.
When some answer makes no sense, always consider the possibility that you’re asking the wrong question.
IMO Musk did not buy Twitter as a profit-making venture. He bought at as something between a vanity platform for himself and a confused idea of providing a social good. Which good, if it delivered according to his (confused) expectations, would pay off for Musk in terms of power and influence, if not in dollars of profit. Akin to the late 1800s Carnegies endowing libraries and colleges, but much more tawdry.
I’m not an Elon Musk fanboy or anything, but you don’t become the richest man on Earth without any business acumen. Which is not to say Elon isn’t a bit of an arrogant insensitive jerk at times, which has led to business mistakes.
But at the end of the day, the way you keep score in business is how much money you make at it.
It is possible Elon has some long term vision or sees some underlying value in Twitter that the rest of us aren’t seeing. So he’s going to shake things up by firing a bunch of people and then hire people who will work the way he wants to work.
Kind of the same thing with Zuckerberg and Meta.
I guess we’ll eventually find out if these guys are geniuses ahead of their time or let their hubris make them bite off more than they could chew.
Well, that might make a twisted sort of sense, but did he expect to have to keep pumping cash into it to keep it a going concern? And what could he possibly have hoped to achieve with that blue check debacle?
To repeat the example that really happened at Twitter:
You find a Mac Mini humming away in a closet. You ask around, and no one knows what it does and where it came from. Do you unplug it?
Yes, staging platforms and all that are great if you were super diligent about setting that stuff up in the first place. So: what if you weren’t? Peter Zatko’s testimony that Shalmanese linked to suggests that things haven’t gotten much better.
I mean, he had a plan towards profitability. The plan was totally untethered from reality but if you ignore that, it was a solid plan.
The plan was to grow Twitter to a billion users and build out a subscription product that would have subscription account for over half of Twitter’s revenue.
He was going to remove all of the woke censorship and defeat all the bots so Twitter could have been a free speech utopia where the people were given the power over the elites and the revitalized town square would have had all of the previously disaffected people flock.
He was also going to build out vague unspecified Twitter Blue features that were so compelling that some large portion of users would pay for Twitter. Ideas floated have included some kind of Onlyfans clone, trying to compete with YouTube over creator monetization, some kind of banking product and, obviously, blue badges for $8 a month.
He was also going to kick all of the woke, coddled engineers in the butt and trim all the unnecessary waste and streamline the operation so that costs were drastically slimmed. After all, confident programmers everywhere have been claiming they could build Twitter over a weekend and maintain it with 4 elite coders so there was obviously plenty of fat to trim.
Again, this is an amazing plan to producing an immensely profitable Twitter that would have made Musk a business genius if not for the one small trivial inconvenience that it is completely delusional.
That’s an odd definitional criteria for colloquial use of the term “stupid” in the sense of “makes a lot of unwise decisions that indicate poor judgement, low information, unwarranted complacency, and/or other characteristics that don’t align with the approach a reasonably smart and prudent person would be expected to take”.
I don’t think anybody in this thread actually believes or is attempting to imply that Elon Musk literally tests at a sub-80 IQ level. He is being called “stupid” and “arrogant” because he’s doing a lot of severely stupid and arrogant things with regard to his management of Twitter. Not because anybody’s trying to arrive at a clinical quantitative assessment of his mental traits.
I could not say that is definitely true.
Truly free speech would likely cost advertising dollars and users. Not every place is as well moderated as the SDMB and some folks are shameless.
Paying 40B then charging users (at most) 40M is not a viable model.
Sure, part of it was a desire for the spotlight. I think he hoped to get attention and then back away, perhaps, assuming the legal obligations had loopholes.
In all honesty, if his intent was really to end surveillance capitalism by going to a subscription model, I might actually check out Twitter (assuming he succeeded.) As a society we are in desperate need of an alternative to the current model.
But as it stands I really don’t know what the hell he is doing. I’m not sure he does either.
Examining log files? Traffic? A/B testing?
Not taking down a microservice that may have ripple effects throughout the system so you actually have no idea you took down the “right” one?
There are ways to EOL any software, just shutting it down and see what happens is possibly the stupidest.
I’m inclined to agree.
Thinking like a socially maladjusted tech genius billionaire, I feel like all the Littlebrains are looking at Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter through the filter of their lazy tiny little brains:
- He’s being mean by firing everyone
- He’s stupid because he hasn’t put together a business plan
- He’s reckless because he’s not following proper IT procedures
- He doesn’t know business because he’s losing customers and advertisers
Elon Musk probably has some vision for what he wants Twitter to become. He didn’t buy a social media platform that has largely remained unchained for 15 years for $50 billion dollars just to keep the status quo (but with less content moderation). I have to assume that much like with rockets, automobiles, and payments systems, he’s looking to do something to revolutionize the platform. I just don’t know what that is yet.
As you said, Twitter isn’t a banking or air traffic control system. Elon Musk probably doesn’t have care about a smooth transition. He just wants to keep the people who share his vision and work ethic to help him rebuild Twitter in his own image. Everyone else can fuck off. Once he’s done the customers and advertisers will come pouring back.
The best metaphor I can think of is buying a crappy house owned by a hoarder in an expensive neighborhood. He wants to fix it up ASAP. He doesn’t care about the historical significance of the house or the sentimental or even potential hidden financial value of all the crap inside. He just wants all their shit out so he can start demoing walls and make it the house into what he wants so he can get the most value out of it.
Except that he’s doing it while there’s still a family living in the house.
Whether people and advertisers come roaring back depends on what his vision actually is. I agree he has something in mind and wants like-minded employees, and is likely more sensitive to criticism than delicate feelings. The question will be if he builds back better after recklessly knocking down the support beams. It is certainly possible.
The problem is that, aside from some minor improvements that could be made, Twitter was working perfectly before. IMHO, of course. Any significant changes he’s contemplating would only screw it up.