Yes, and both certainly take care to give the impression that it’s MBA program instead of the undergrad.
I think it matters if you plan on posting material that could get you booted from your server. If you’re going to be as nice and polite as you are here, it probably doesn’t matter. I picked one that didn’t need manual approval.
Your app matters – the official Mastodon app is terrible, so I’m using Tusky, which is a third party Android app and really feels like Twitter.
Also, apparently the mobile website is quite good.
I don’t know when all those fired employees are starting to cash their severance checks. I guess when they are halfway through it’ll be done.
“But I repeat myself.”
“Yea, I am a “hardcore engineer”; I’m watching hardcore porn all day on my work computer.:”
Let’s look at what sort of company Elon bought and see if what we’ve been told about Twitter matches reality. To do that, we’re going to review the basic financials in Twitter’s last 10k, published February 2022.
Let’s start with their balance sheet:
I highlighted one line - cash and cash equivalents (we will see this again in the Statement of Cash Flows) - to show that Twitter wasn’t “running out of cash”. It had $2 billion, up from $1.8 billion the year before.
Also, note they weren’t close to being insolvent, not with $14B in assets and $6.7B in liabilities.
Looking at this from an M&A standpoint, for a $46 billion deal, there’s neither a lot of cash to raid (for pay down of debt) nor are there a lot of plant/equipment one can sell off. One of the classic moves, of course, is to buy a company and then sell divisions to pay down the debt - but Twitter doesn’t really even have that, do they?
LOL, I wonder what poor bastard is calling those doubtful accounts (line 5).
OK, I have three charts for the Consolidated Statements of Operations. The first is summary dollar figures:
This second breaks down the revenue category:
The third is the second chart as a percentage of total revenue:
Let’s look at revenues first:
89% of revenue, $4.5 billion, is advertising. This is the revenue base which builds that balance sheet above. To Elon’s point, there is no material revenue from users.
So… let’s say we want 10% of our revenue to come from our users. That’s $500m. At $8/month, that’s 5,200,000 people needed to subscribe to Twitter Blue, so for every $100m of growth you will need slightly more than 1 million new users. (Of course, this service will have a cost element of its own, the structure of which I have no idea because it’s new and not disclosed here.)
Do note that Twitter paid out a one-time $785m litigation settlement, which itself is the difference between a $221m loss and a $544m profit for FY2021.
Also, in 2020, there is a $1 billion charge for the provision of income taxes. That one time charge… like the 2021 settlement… was the difference between an operations loss and break-even. In 2019 (top chart of these three), Twitter benefited from a $1 billion income tax provision, which was paid the next, so it looks as if they just deferred a tax payment for one year.
Lastly, let’s look at the expense categories R&D and SG&A because much of that is the payroll which Elon has slashed.
So R&D is $1.25 billion, S is $1.2b, and G&A is $600m.
Assume, what… 60% is payroll?
$3.05B * 60% = $1.8 billion in pre-Elon payroll ($240k per employee assuming 7,500 employees).
With but 1,000 employees remaining, looks like Elon may have saved $1.4 billion in payroll… but payroll isn’t merely an expense. He also lost his sales team(s).
Lastly is the Statement of Cash Flows:
The first highlighted line shows that, once everything is accounted for, Twitter is cash positive from operations. The bottom line shows that once investments and financing activities are accounted for, Twitter’s cash position has increased by $200 million a year for the past 2 years.
So… in conclusion, Twitter is an average company. Not very profitable, not burdened with losses or debt, it could have kept chugging along with no need of a savior. In some ways, it reminds me of 1975-era AMC (American Motors Corporation) - the smallest of an near-monopolistic market, they survived by offering products (the Rambler, the Jeep) which filled niches ignored by the larger companies (GM, Ford, Chrysler).
It surely wasn’t worth $54 a share - the Statement of Equity (below) has a book value of $9.125 - and I don’t think this company is positioned as to lose 80% of its workforce and still keep operating under the same financial structure. I mean, the balance sheet now has an additional $13 billion of debt added on to it! There goes the shareholder’s equity, once a positive $7 billion now a negative $6 billion!
Yeah, it’s like joining a startup that has drummed up $44B in many rounds of funding. It doesn’t seem like you would get a significant chunk of equity. You’d be better off putting those long hours in somewhere else.
Twitter’s original funding was less than $800M to get to a $9.25B valuation.
It would have been cheaper to hire 2500 people and build a Twitter clone with the features he wants. It would have been the new big thing and had tons of free marketing.
Except that there would still be twitter there to compete with.
Musk has done a favor to some lucky startup who will fill the niche that twitter used to.
Hmmm. I wonder what other startups like that exist that Musk might already own?
The county of Alameda ordered the Fremont Tesla plant closed during the pandemic and Elon defied them and reopened without authorization. Then 100s of workers got sick with covid.
Have to wonder what the relationship is between Twitter and Bluesky.
Would like to note that… with no HR department to verify… I am now the ex-Lead of Product Development (Android) @ Twitter, Inc, from 2017-2022. And you can’t prove I wasn’t! 
Someone has been optimizing work-from-home.
…now that Twitter is removing the protections for transgender people and Musk has set up a poll to see if the people want Trump to come back (spoiler: Trump’s gonna come back) : Its time to lock the account, then get ready for the maelstrom. 
Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, has written an editoral about what’s happening with Twitter (gift link) and its possible implications.
One thing he mentions that I hadn’t thought about is that if Twitter turns into another version of 4chan, Apple and Google could pull the Twitter app from their stores, and the European Union could assess financial penalties if Twitter violates their Digital Services Act. He says 80 percent of Twitter users are outside of the US, which means other countries’ laws and regulations can have a significant effect on the company’s future:
Of course he has, because as I’ve pointed out multiple times, Musk desperately wants to be Friedrich Flick to Trump’s Hitler, although neither of them are as competent at demagoguery and fascism as their would-be counterparts.
Stranger
They seem to be competent enough for their intended audience.
But not enough to be successful in business or politics, respectively. What is more worrisome is what comes next, fostered by how far they have gotten with this routine.
Stranger
Floor show.
(Clearly it’s to be no picnic.)
The folks over at r/ProgrammerHumor were practically woozy at the thought of printing code, as Elon first asked for, but then it got even worse when he asked for screenshots to be emailed.
What kind of monster asks for screenshots of code? The same kind who asks for printouts: completely out of touch.
Yeah, this really had me scratching my head.