I’m not sure if you can describe what were 80% of the staff two months ago being unemployed and unhappy as “a few”
Sure, there might be something amazing going on behind the scenes. Or maybe this was a bad investment for all those guys backing Musk and this ends in tears and ashes.
What about all the very smart rich people who backed Theranos? Who backed FTX? Who backed Enron and Arthur Anderson?
I don’t care how smart or rich or informed you are - you can still wind up with a failed venture. Listing a bunch of guys and saying “it must be right, these guys are doing it” despite other evidence of a venture getting ready to circle the drain is nothing more than another form of celebrity endorsement.
Or, you know, if he doesn’t like how you kiss his ass or you have some problem where you can’t work 80 weeks or you’re not willing to put his interests above your own or your own family he can smash your career.
There are many other companies to work for, most of them less chaotic right now.
Sure, the risk vs. reward currently at Twitter will appeal to some single, unattached, very aggressive people. They are free to take that course. But for most people working 80 hours a week for a megalomaniac who changes the rules hourly, breaks the law, with no guarantee of a reward at the end of the ride is completely unappealing.
So far, his ideas haven’t seemed to be any good. He rolled out a checkmark plan and had to roll it back after a week. He laid off a huge chunk of his workforce, apparently with many of them people who actually have to do the things to keep the lights on, like make payroll and pay bills. He reviews programmer coding skills with little to no notice and what appears to be little to no time to do the job properly. Large numbers of his biggest customers are suspending their use of Twitter.
He may have ideas, but I don’t see a plan. Granted, I don’t have to see a plan, but the high quality workers he wants to keep need to see a plan.
If Musk is in fact a lousy boss who’s screwing up his company and its only chance of survival is having Musk wander off to “get hooked on the next thing” and let a competent leader replace him, then where the hell is the long-term advantage to “impressing” Musk or “working closely” with him or “hitching your wagon” to him?
The whole point of an employee throwing their cap over the windmill, so to speak, to go all in on a risky venture with an adventurous boss is that their confidence in the vision and trustworthiness of the boss outweighs their fear of the accompanying risks. This standard trope of inspirational business folklore premises that you hitch your wagon to the boss’s crazy moon-shot idea because you have faith in your boss, and have very good reason to believe that he/she has what it takes to make the dream happen, and also that he/she will be loyal to you in return for your beyond-the-call-of-duty service.
But if you’re confronted with a situation where (a) the business venture is high-stakes and high-risk and also (b) it’s highly likely that your boss is a petulant bastard with no personal loyalty to employees and a disastrous lack of impulse control, then that makes the wagon-hitching choice a much more questionable one.
About 20 years ago, my late husband was on the Tandem Employee Choir, but I don’t recall there was an official Tandem song.
Up until two years ago, I was doing user administration on mainframe and there was definitely stuff written in FORTRAN and COBOL merrily running along calculating interest on your mortgage, managing loan syndication, etc. The code and hardware are so good at financial transaction processing that the bank would periodically hold classes to teach programming in those “dead” languages.
Musk has lots of irons in lots of fires. Any relatively junior software developer - no matter how good - who thinks he is going to be in Musk’s field of view after he signs on is kidding themselves.
Twitters income last year was $5.08 billion. At $100 a year, that;s going to take 50 million people signing up for the green checkmark to replace. However in behavioral economics we know there is a vast difference between free and not free - even very cheap. Musk may be convincing himself he’s going to replace revenue with what is basically a subscription (but without nearly as much value) but he’s kidding himself. And once people game the system making certification not trustworthy, he has even less chance of getting those users to sign up. How many Twitter users do you really think give a shit about certification. Politicians, businesses, influencers (who aren’t only on TikTok) and who else? I have a Twitter account for the conference I’m involved with, I sure as hell aren’t going to pay Elon to be certified though we can easily afford it.
As for YouTube, I follow YouTube far more than Twitter, and I can’t dispute your complaints about it. But do you think advertisers on a TwitTube that allows the same kind of content Elon is allowing on Twitter going to be any happier? Or do you think people will pay for what YouTube gives for free. I don’t know how subscription YouTube is doing but based on its lack of mention in articles about streaming services, I suspect not well. Plus, Google has deeper pockets than Musk.
Advertisers care about who is watching and reading. If the increased user base - if it really exists - consists of trolls and extremists, they won’t be coming back.
Young officers of the Empire who don’t bail to join the rebellion may wind up in positions of authority. Or they may get choked by Lord Vader when he decides they screwed up.
Especially after the whole $8-chan blue checkmark sale shredded the credibility of any sort of “certification” Twitter might attempt to offer in the future. What else is there to offer that someone would pay eight bucks a month to get?
All of those are very reasonable points. I agree that if Musk thinks he dan raise billions in subscription money, he’s kidding himself. Even if he only charged $1, he’d be lucky to get 1% of users paying. Most sites find that even getting people to register for free captures only a small percentage of the audience.
But I don’t know if that’s the plan. I assume there is a plan - a lot of people invested big money in this, including some large VC firms, and I can say from experience that the #1 thing potential investors want to see is a plan for profitability and repayment. But I don’t know if Musk’s current behaviour is part of that plan, or helping to destroy it.
I find it interesting that Jack Dorsey is endorsing him and invested 1.5 billion in the new Twitter. Hard to believe he hasn’t been given any plans for Twitter’s future direction that he thinks is at least feasible. I still suspect Dorsey is part of this - probably with Bluesky. He and Musk go back a long way, and Dorsey has said that he fully supports Musk buying Twitter, and in fact I think he said that Musk is the best person for the job or something to that effect.
In Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely tells of a study that showed people rejected better quality stuff (candy) that cost almost nothing versus worse quality stuff for free. So 1% would be optimistic.
Verification (I think they are taking ID now and doing it properly)
Your tweets show up in the verified list, which is promoted above non-verified
Musk is negotiating with paywalled media companies to allow a Twitter Blue user to bypass the paywall for a linked story. In return, some of the $8 will be used for micropayments to the media company. It’s a good idea, but given Musk’s negotiations so far, I wouldn’t count on too many media companies participating.
Access to long-form posting and long video posts. I’m not sure if this is that valuable, at least now.
Encrypted DMs
50% fewer ads
Some of these might be available without verification - it’s not clear.
One of Musk’s plans is to incorporate digital payments so that content creators can set their own prices and users can pay them directly. He also wants to expand this to a general feature allowing payment transfers between users. This potentially could be a rival for Patreon or GiveSendGo. It could even turn into a Paypal-like service between members.
Obviously, the payment functionality would require a verified account.
The article describes him as ‘brainstorming’ and making it up as he goes, but he’s said all this before that call in the article.
Yeah. Huge audiences on the internet are there because it is frictionless. It’s amazing how much even a tiny bit of friction can ahrink an audience. Or consider how much more money Amazon has made because of 1-click buying. Even Amazon users with accounts will abandon sales if they are forced to do a single extra click.
Being a UX specialist, I’m really familiar with this. A chunk of my career was spent trying to shave little bits of friction out of user experiences.
Is there information on Dorsey’s Twitter stance/status more recent than Nov. 6? I haven’t found any public references by him to Twitter after that.
Admittedly, three weeks is not a long time, but things have been happening fast at Twitter. There is also a school of thought that holds that making Twitter profitable is not the actual objective for either Musk or Dorsey in the near term, but I don’t know how accurate that analysis (from 29 October, which is even longer ago than 6 November) is.
The last thing I saw from Dorsey that had to do with Musk was basically an apology to Twitter users for all the layoffs. Mind you, he didn’t blame Musk - he blamed himself for trying to grow Twitter too fast - an admission that there was a lot of employment bloat.
As for the other stuff, I said exactly that earlier. I have a suspicion that the Twitter duture includes a federated model, a payment sustem, probably with crypto (both Elon and Jack are crazy for crypto - an enthusiasm I don’t share), Bluesky as the API forma federated system, etc.
It’s entirely possible tht the people investing the money are not doing this for profit, but for ideology. Most of the main investors are either libertarian or lean that way, All of them are free speech focused. I think they want to make lots of money from this, but I’m not sure they’ll bail if they don’t.
I can’t believe that Musk is a paladin of free speech when he’s constantly whining about lefties exercising their right to free speech to put pressure on advertisers.
And criticises the advertisers for not wanting their speech to be next to anti-semitic garbage speech.
The thing is, people are very biased towards their own subjective experience. As we’ve seen over and over again, it’s really hard to believe that your spouse / family member / buddy is really guilty of the crimes that they are, in fact, guilty of; how much easier is it to fool yourself into thinking your rich business crony is, in fact, a good businessman?
Ockham’s Razor suggests that people are making judgements based on their feelings as well as the evidence vs. just the evidence. Therefore, there’s no knowing how robust that evidence is: maybe Dorsey has seen something really solid, but maybe he’s had a conversation or two and found that to be enough.
It also matters a lot where he stands with regard to 1.5 billion. If he is confident in earning more than that over the next couple of years elsewhere, he loses nothing for the risk. If he only has $1,500,000,000.03 to his name and no next paycheque, he’d better be supremely confident. I’m sure the truth is in the middle, but where?
Nearly everyone in Silicon Valley grew too fast, thanks to raking in money during the pandemic. Meta certainly did. The same thing happened during the bubble.
But was Twitter 3 times as large as it should be? Even twice? In the advertising department? In the department that tries to keep out improper posts?
I’d love to see the details of the deal like Dorsey got. He is sounding like Patty Hearst joining her captors than an independent former CEO.
Thanks to the lawsuit, all of Musk’s communications with potential co-investors are now public and we can definitively say that there was extremely little concern about such things by the people who offered to co-invest.
Extremely wealthy co-investors might be precisely the sort of people who would derive real future benefit from “impressing” or getting close to someone like Musk. The prospect of becoming a close associate of a really rich person can potentially be long-term advantageous enough to another really rich person to outweigh the loss of their initial investment in one of his ventures that turns out to be a turkey.
For the non-wealthy “little nobody” coding professionals whom Sam was blithely hypothetically advising to “hitch their wagon” to Musk in the hope of getting significant career boosts, though? Probably not so much.