All of that is completely reasonable. Musk’s tweets often seem counterproductive. It seems sometimes like he’s a kid with a new toy. Not a good look.
However… None of this is fatal. My suspicion is that Musk is going to get hooked on the next thing at some point and take his focus elsewhere and appoint a new CEO who will calm everyone down. But maybe not.
As a reminder, though, Musk isn’t alone in this. He’s got billions of dollars in backing from a lot of very smart people who have known Musk for a long time and have a lot more information about him and his plans than we do. Jack Dorsey knows more about Twitter than anyone, and he’s a big fan of the Musk takeover and invested at least 1.5 billion dollars in the new Twitter.
There may be a lot more going on behind the scenes than we know. All of us are operating from almost complete ignorance other than Musk’s tweets and those of a few disgruntled ex-employees.
I’ve sweated layoffs because there were no similar jobs I could get without moving – something I didn’t want to do. And I’ve told my boss to please put me first if we had layoffs, because I had options, and I knew my co-workers had more constrained options.
Really, it has little to do with “do I have great skills”, it’s about your other options. In IT, if you have a citizenship or a green card, I think everyone at Twitter has options.
Of course, my experiences with layoffs are mostly from companies I expected to survive. The one place I worked that collapsed paid me a substantial bonus to stick with them for a while (and didn’t ask me to work crazy hours) because they needed staff to wind down in an organized way.
I would absolutely give my kid different advice than you would give yours. I would echo @Voyager . First, if my kid had great skills, I would encourage him to find a better option. “Take the money and run”. Second, if my kid were really marginal, I would encourage him to take the guaranteed payment. But if my kid were mediocre, I would ask him how he felt about gambling, and lots of overtime. Because I think you are right, if Twitter survives, the people who stick with it will probably do fairly well. And it’s a good opportunity for mediocre workers to succeed beyond their skills. There are, of course, the twin risks that twitter will fail and that my kid would wear out from the work. But it’s a gamble I would suggest my mediocre kid consider.
The entire tech-bro industry is built on a house-of-cards. Much of it isn’t profitable. Much of it don’t even have a pathway to profitability. The typical game plan is to raise venture capital, build a product or services that is popular and sell it for less than it costs to hopefully get market share, then cash out when the price is right just-before-it-fails. Because when you are running a business that doesn’t and will never make a profit, failure is an inevitability.
The Twitter board cashed out. And Elon’s the sucker left carrying the can.
I’ve talked about the Banquet Bear Theory of Chaos before. Things are predictably unpredictable. We know Twitter is going to fail. Billions of debt. No business plan, no strategy, no pathway to profitability, no accountability, no guardrails on the man in charge who is currently cozying up to some of the most appalling people on Twitter and is publicly picking fights with the only people who could possibly save him.
Twitter is almost certainly going to fail. That much is predictable. Exactly how that failure will look though? We don’t really know, because there are so many moving parts, the situation is extremely chaotic, things are changing hour-to-hour. But we can predict though is that it will be spectacular, and very-very-public.
I do see one way out for Musk here though. The only way that Twitter survives is if the tech-bro industry closes ranks and bails him out. And I can see that happening. Again: I don’t know exactly what a “bail out” would look like. I’m imagining someone like Marc Benioff or Larry Ellison helping out behind the scenes. Bringing in a Twitter CEO who’s job is to put the guardrails up and to basically calm-everything-the-fuck-down.
But that’s the only way that Twitter survives. Tech isn’t going to save it. The Tech-Bro industry going “we aren’t going to let Elon Musk lose face” is the only way that Twitter gets out of this.
I’d ask what the quality of those laid off, and those who quit, were. If superstars are leaving like crazy, if the 50% layoff included some losers but some critical people also, I’d get out. Are the people who know the big picture staying or leaving? How’s the documentation? Better be pretty good if your knowledge base went out the door. If a server goes down, how long does it take to bring back up? That’s a sign the infrastructure is not being tended to.
I’d also check to see if I can figure out the advertising. You keep on talking about users, but they don’t pay the bills directly. If a big advertiser sees the conversation dominated by crazies and racists, they aren’t going to put their money in so that their ads will be right next to racist drivel. (MyPillow excepted, of course.) 50% of the big advertisers are gone, and I wonder how many more will follow.
Working 14 hour days is not good for you, not in the long run. (For a few weeks, fine.) It does not lead to quality code or sanity. And if things collapse, no doubt Musk will blame the coders and give them a worse package.
One thing you got right - hardly anyone in Silicon Valley will see being laid off from or quitting Twitter as a black mark on their resume.
Oh, but you forgot the really smart people behind Twitter. Like the really smart ones who put money in FTX. And the really smart ones, responsible for hundreds of millions of bucks of their investors money who, according to the Times, listened to a presentation by Alameda Research that said they were offering great returns at no risk. And then said, sounds good to me, sign me up.
What Sam forgets is that behind every debacle there is really smart money and smart people - or smart until things collapse.
…the thing is: the real problem that Twitter is facing right now are the horribly mundane. GDPR compliance. The FTC consent decree. Moderation. Payroll. Can they stay on the Apple App Store.
Its obvious that they are no longer in compliance with GDPR, the only question we have now is what everyone is going to do about it.
If it was only one thing, then you can mitigate that. But it’s multiple things happening all at the same time with the person in charge not actually understanding how important all of these things are.
That used to be true, but today facebook is profitable, and Twitter is (was) profitable. One of the knocks on Twitter, in fact, is that it has lagged behind the other ‘tech bro’ businesses in profitability. Twitter has never grown to the size of its rivals. Not even close. It’s also been stagnant in new features compared tomits rivals.
But I don’t disagree about the risks here. I mentioned very early on that Twitter is at more risk of a large scale flight of users than is a site like facebook, because facebook has huge and powerful network effects that Twitter doesn’t. If all your friends and family are on facebook, it’s hard tomleave for an alternative. And each one of your friends and family have their own networks that tie them to the platform.
Twitter is not like that. It’s more like a youtube model - peoole go there to read a smaller group of content creators. If they take their content elsewhere, the audience will go with them. Somyea, Twitter is a big risk for Musk.
No business plan or strategy that we know of. Twitter is now private, and they don’t have to tell us anything about their plans.
Musk has big time investment compnanies, Venture Capital, and a who’s who of Silicon Valley backing him. Do you really think they would invest in such an obvious failure?
Some of the peoole behind the Twitter deal:
Marc Andreesen
Larry Ellison
David Sacks
Jack Dorsey
Sequoia Capital
All of them have invested in Musk’s ventures before, and you can be certain they needed to see some kind of plan formhowmMusk wanted to turn around Twitter. None of them are in the habit of throwing money away for yucks.
Speaking of Marc Andreesen, this is an interesting comment from him:
Doing some reading about why people are investing most seem to believe that Twitter is underdeveloped and undervalued. They think it could be much more than just a 280 character tweet repository with some ads sprinkled in it.
As for Twitter failing Musk has $13 billion in loans. He can easily maintain payments on those loans even if Twitter earned nothing. Twitter my in fact eventually die, but then the same is true of the other big digital companies. My money would be on facebook going under before Twitter does.
I think there is in fact a business plan and some big ideas in the works for Twitter. My doubts are more along the lines of whether their ideas are any good or will work, not whether they have them at all.
A year ago I would have agreed. I’m not so sure now, Layoffs are happening all over Silicon Valley, and high interest rates play havoc with venture capital. Money is not going to be so easy to get in the next year or two.
3700 ex-Twitter employees are going to be competing with 11,000 layed off Facebook employees and lots of others:
Those are the ones that have already been announced. There is likely a recession coming along with more rate hikes. It could be a tech bloodbath.
Tech has been swimming in cash for a decades. We built a huge bubble (again) with a decade of low interest rates. Silicon Valley has gotten lazy and bloated. Now reality is starting to set in.
I would not want to be an out-of-work programmer in Silicon Valley at this moment.
Maybe they are right. Certainly there will be demand for coders, and especially for cybersecurity people as they say. That doesn’t mean the hiring will be in Silicon Valley. If Twitter developers were making an average of $230K, that’s more than twice the national average salary for software engineers. If that’s typical for Silicon Valley, even if it’s because of the cost of living, in tight times I would expect those sorts of jobs to go away.
No, what Imwas saying was that Marc Andreesen posted that if he was a 20-year old coder again, he’d love the opportunity. I made no claim other than that. To me, it suggested some confidence in what Musk is doing and the opportunity it presents for young coders. I wasn’t really looking for subtext.
Sure. Those are all reasonable things to look at. I’ve survived layoffs that get other critical people, and it sucks. I also know what it’s like to work in a company that is making terrible decisions and wrecking its products and you can see the storm clouds coming. It also sucks.
All of that should be considered, but balanced against it is the chance to work closely with the most successful entrepreneur of our time - a person who, if he is convinced you are an asset, could make your career take off.
I’m not sure they are going to even retain the advertising model, or at least if it’s the plan to be the major funding model.
I think Musk is planning to use Twitter to take on Youtube. Youtube is another huge platform that its content creators dislike. Its algorithmns drive trivial and sensational content over long form, well produced videos, It has many rules for what can and can’t be monetized, and it changes formula without notice, causing huge problems for content creators who can see their revenue stream cut in half overnight because of an algo change they weren’t even notified about. This has forced many content providers to move to Patreon or other external sources of funding, meaning they are no longer locked to Youtube. It’s ripe for disruption.
Also, if Musk can leep or grow the user base, I predict the advertisers will slowly come back once things calm down. If they do.
…it’s still true. Facebook and Twitter are exceptions to the rule, not the rule. Just in the last year two start-ups that are essential to my business got gobbled up by Adobe.
Its why the tech bros are so excited about Twitter right now: you said it yourself, you think its a “rare opportunity.” They are in love with the idea of a start-up, not the reality. So they reinvent Taxi’s as “ride-sharing” and Bed and Breakfast as “Airbnb” and they drive down wages and destroy the competition and dismantle regulations and when things go belly-up they just pretend it didn’t happen and start again.
Well no it isn’t. Youtube videos take a lot of fricken work to produce. I made a simple three minute video which was basically a series of screenshots and a voice over, and it took me four days to produce including scripting, editing, and adding captions to make it accessible.
Compare that to the amount of time it takes me to compose a Tweet.
And…I’ve Tweeted.
Its a very simple process. It took seconds. And if people think what I wrote is interesting then they can follow along every interesting thought that I say.
The value of Youtube is content.
The value of Twitter is community.
If you haven’t heard of it before, Black Twitter is one of the strongest communities on the platform. New Zealand Twitter is also very strong and very local: pretty much divided into a number of camps that basically spend all of their time on Twitter talking to each other. I’ve got friends on Twitter that I’ve never met in real life and if I ever did I probably wouldn’t know what to say to them. Its a platform that has grown to be able to do this thing very well. Which is why most of NZ Twitter are still hanging around, because the platform is what we make of it, not anyone else.
We aren’t having discussion with content creators. The thing is: that’s what Musk thinks we are doing. And its that kind of thinking that will lead to Twitters downfall.
LOL.
There isn’t a secret business plan or strategy that can save Twitter. Not from where we are at. If he isn’t bailed out by his peers Twitter is over. There just isn’t enough money to offset the amount of money Twitter is losing. It’s basic business.
Yeah I do, because we’ve seen time and time again that rich white men are invested in the success of other rich white men. That you’ve provided a list of rich white men (one of whom I’ve already mentioned is likely to bail him out) really isn’t a surprise.
LOL.
They do this all the time.
Marc Andereesn is dangerous. This isn’t an “incredible moment.” Elon Musk is clearly an abusive and unstable boss that allows misogyny and racism to thrive, his entire history shows us this, what he has done to Twitter in a matter of weeks has shown us this, and if Andereesn thinks that this is a good thing then he is complicit.
At the moment the 280 character tweet repository with some ads sprinkled in it is the only thing bringing in cash through the door.
It is entirely reasonable to think that “Twitter is underdeveloped and undervalued.” But firing all of the staff who were bringing in cash through the door, breaking all the systems that enabled those who were actually advertising with them and insulting all of those who don’t think this is a smart idea is probably the worst way to deal with this.
The loans are just one problem among many problems. Legal compliance. Paying the bills. Paying their staff.
My money is that we aren’t far away from a crash the size of the dot-com bubble. The entire house of cards: the tech-bros, the gig economy, crypto, its all going to come crashing down in a real big way, and Elon Musk is accelerating it. Its a miracle that these industries sustained themselves for this long.
We’ve seen the “big ideas.” Twitter 2.0. They aren’t exactly secret.
And those big plans are simply not big enough to generate the money that Twitter needs to meet basic legal compliance in the EU, let alone the rest of the world. Either Musk gets bailed out by his rich white friends, or Twitter crashes and burns. There is no other option.
Another item that I wonder where you are getting that, I have seen that there are creators that have issues, and I notice that many times Patreon is used in addition to YouTube, but the problem here is that many creators on Youtube don’t really dislike it.
Adam Mosseri said that surveys of creators showed that Instagram “lag[s] behind TikTok and YouTube on all the dimensions that are most important to creator satisfaction,” including several unrelated to the ability to make money, such as “fun, reach, fair algorithm and care.”
Re: “If I were a coder in my 20s again…”—why “in my 20s” ? Because the youngest workers are the most exploitable: they’re more likely to be willing to work for lower wages and to have less experience in the workplace.
Maybe I’m reading that wrong, but if it was really an opportunity, it would be an opportunity for all. “If I were a coder again…”
…Musk has made it clear that he wants to take on Youtube. But you can’t both “take on Youtube” AND do everything else that he has said that he is going to do. Not with a significantly reduced staff. Not with significantly reduced revenue.
There is absolutely nothing in what we have seen in the last month that will convince me that Twitter will come up with a solution to “algorithmns driving trivial and sensational content over long form”. And there are many good reasons why some things shouldn’t be monetized, and “changes to formulas without notice” is something that happens to every single platform that is locked into the various whims of an algorithm and we are witnessing the chaos that can happen due to the lack of human moderation right now.
To disrupt Youtube you first need to understand Youtube and there aren’t any signs that Musk understands much about Youtube or Twitter at all.
My experiences with Twitter video: a couple of months ago Twitter pushed out to a test group of users a new interface for video that had been tweaked to work similarly to Youtube Shorts and TikTok.
And it was terrible. It was enough to make me want to quit Twitter right there and then.
Technically, it was fine. It worked exactly as one would expect. But it was overlaid with a caption and I could barely see what was on the screen. And when I “tapped” the screen to make the text go away (like I do now) it didn’t make the text go away, it just paused it.
But the worst things was when when it got to the end of the video it didn’t end or repeat. It automatically redirected me to another (unrelated) “viral” video on that was on the feed of somebody I didn’t know.
The reasons for all of this were quite clear: Youtube Shorts and TikTok work because you can easily find and consume similar content with nothing more than a swipe.
But if I want to watch a TikTok then I’ll go to TikTok. I’m not on Twitter to (necessarily) watch videos. I’m there for the community. Youtube and TikTok have fundamentally different target markets. For Twitter to “disrupt” Youtube it need to completely reposition itself in the market.
There are other ways to implement video that aren’t as intrusive or annoying. But if you don’t have TikTok style redirects, then you will never get the kind of engagement you will need to generate revenue.
And to build a platform that appeals to content creators you are going to have to figure out a way to share revenue. You are going to have to spend millions to bring over the big name Youtubers to your platform.
But you are competing against this.
For all of its flaws Youtube offers its content creators relative stability. The single thing that Twitter isn’t offering right now is stability.
You can’t trust a platform that treats its staff as appallingly as Twitter has over the last month. You can’t trust a platform that doesn’t meet basic levels of legal compliance, that dismisses staff on a whim, that can’t even make payroll payments on time, that considers “perks” as not essential elements of employee compensation but expenses that can simply be taken away. You can’t trust a business where the boss in publicly berating businesses that have decided they no longer want to work with him any more.
If you were a content creator that has a big audience on Youtube and is making decent money, would you sign a contract with Elon Musk after what we’ve all just seen him doing?
I certainly wouldn’t. Which is why Twitter Video is doomed to fail.