Musk offers to buy Twitter

[DT]

Without taking a long time to sit down and write an actual business plan, a real model for moving forward, informed by existing analytics, SMEs, client discussions, here's my own shitty $0.02 on how I would've approached this:

Don't buy Twitter
Don't pay $44B

OK, so clearly, we're past that ...

Do a company wide audit to determine costs, from infrastructure to the snack bar (side note: the grocery by the SF Twitter offices is amazing ...), get a baseline for costs vs. revenue (this is usually done during DD), but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, tech companies are people companies (See below)

Identify the talent, what's needed, who's filling those roles, is there staff imbalance, too many low end coders vs. QA for example, if someone is good, and their skills are portable (or easily retrained), don't let them go, good products are developed under good situations, this whole idea of 80 hours in an "I could lose my job anytime" environment, is bullshit

Determine exactly what the product is, get vertical, focus on perfecting that vs. trying to be a social network, a town square, an ad platform, a transaction system

Communicate with the clients, the people who pay the bills, the advertisers, give them assurances that their money is being well spent, find new opportunities and create client retention by servicing them better

The "product" for clients are the users, us, the people, focus on retention, a positive user experience by way of people seeing what they want, not seeing what they don't, i.e., f***ing curation and control of the content, people leave, there's no product for the client, no clients means no revenue

Holy hell, it's business 101 ... it's not rocket science.

 

[Cmaier]

This appears to be a real interaction between two official accounts, though it’s hard to tell anymore. I don’t have any context as to whom the senator is, but it’s a rather odd way of trying to reassure advertisers that official accounts won’t be impersonated.

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1591813228119855104/

 

[Renzatic]

Yeah I'd love working for a company where house counsel reassures me I (probably?) won't go to jail for just showing up to work.

To be fair, that is something that's nice to know ahead of time.

 

[Cmaier]

To be fair, that is something that's nice to know ahead of time.

Everyone should always remember that when your company’s lawyer gives you advice, the lawyer isn’t representing you. She’s representing the company.

 

[lizkat]

This appears to be a real interaction between two official accounts, though it’s hard to tell anymore. I don’t have any context as to whom the senator is, but it’s a rather odd way of trying to reassure advertisers that official accounts won’t be impersonated.

Yah... Senator Markey is on a bunch of committees or subcommittees that do have oversight on aspects of Musk's companies. It was probably not brilliant of Musk to have just tweeted back what he did to Markey, if both Twitter accounts (at time of that exchange anyway) were genuine.

Ed Markey - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Edd]

SO glad they're using "buddy Jesus" from Dogma. Need to watch that flick again.

Um, it’s Buddy Christ, thank you.

 

[Eric]

 

[Cmaier]

Between this and FSD, it seems Elon doesn’t know what “drive” means.

 

[Cmaier]

 

[Citysnaps]

A real shame Musk didn't buy out Fox News instead. He'd still have billions left over. And Fox would cease to exist.

Fox Net Worth 2018-2024 | FOX

Interactive chart of historical net worth (market cap) for Fox (FOX) over the last 10 years. How much a company is worth is typically represented by its market capitalization, or the current stock price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. Fox net worth as of May 20, 2024 is...

www.macrotrends.net

 

[lizkat]

A real shame Musk didn't buy out Fox News instead. He'd still have billions left over. And Fox would cease to exist.

Fox Net Worth 2018-2024 | FOX

Interactive chart of historical net worth (market cap) for Fox (FOX) over the last 10 years. How much a company is worth is typically represented by its market capitalization, or the current stock price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. Fox net worth as of May 20, 2024 is...

www.macrotrends.net

Ha ha, yeah!

And to think that once he could have walked away for what now seems like a paltry $1 billion breakup fee, but which at the time he wanted to dodge somehow. And "somehow" turned into this debacle.

There must be some angle to it all that I still don't get unless the guy is just nuts.

I mean to address Senator Markey as Musk has now done (again assuming those tweets and documents were genuine, which i think is the case), the Chief Twit signals he doesn't gaf about oversight or risk management or data laws compliance or any other niceties of regulation under the telecoms acts, FTC, EC or EU, so he will be legally unable to run the thing and will have to step back... and probably file for bankruptcy.

He and the banks and we all had better hope that it's Chapter 11 and not 7, because the latter means liquidation, not reorganization... and what is got from liquidating some server leases and a pile of code pray tell? Pretty sure the bankers would press for chapter 11 filing.

Wonder who will end up running Twitter during a reorg?

 

[Citysnaps]

There must be some angle to it all that I still don't get unless the guy is just nuts.

Yeah, I don't get that either. The guy isn't stupid getting Tesla and SpaceX off the ground.

 

[lizkat]

For those who followed news of the now former Prime Minister Liz Truss and some rude comparisons as to which could last longer, Ms Liz in office or a head of lettuce... now looms a parallel comparison for Twitter under Musk.

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1591935214280126465/

Musk has essentially tweeted to a US Senator on oversight committees that he doesn't GAF about stuff like risk management, compliance iwth data security laws and so forth. Twitter will shortly be unable to operate legally and so may be taken down at least until something like a Chapter 11 filing can facilitate reorganization and new leadership if not a sale.

​

 

[Andropov]

Ex-Twitter employees have been contradicting some of Elon's statements after he claimed that the app is slow in some countries "because it's sending 1000 RPCs just to load the timeline", and he has personally replied to some of them.

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1591875679377031169/

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1591937998551130117/

The immaturity here is astonishing. This kind of "comebacks" like "what have you done to fix that?" to a random Twitter for Android engineer may have sounded cool in his head but... man I don't even know where to start. Is this just his way of coping with the enormous screw up he created himself?

 

[Andropov]

Some insight supporting what many people are saying regarding how Twitter could catastrophically fail if all the servers go down:

https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1591939282947952640/

On one hand, maybe after narrowly avoiding the problem in 2021 Twitter spent resources to put a plan/protocol in place in case the platform had to be cold-booted. On the other hand, it’s highly likely that Musk fired all the people that knew about that plan and had the knowledge to carry it out. So, who knows what might happen.

 

[DT]

There must be some angle to it all that I still don't get unless the guy is just nuts.

I've puzzled and puzzled 'till my puzzler was sore ...

I've certainly never operated anywhere near the scale of Twitter, or Musk, but I have a reasonable understanding of how these things work, and I just can't figure this out - but I'm approaching it as someone who doesn't have the wealth that allows me to circumvent the law, ignore responsibility, and just generally just fuck up and face zero consequences.

I think Musk legitimately doesn't have much self-awareness, he's so removed from normal human concerns, that he just doesn't think there's any repercussions, that somehow, it will work out for him, that he can just spew nonsense, make with the LOLs, ignore protocols, do things that have severe consequences for everyone around him, but not him.

In his mind, the $1B was admitting to his mistake, it wasn't the money, it was saving face. He'd much rather run the risk of way more loss if it gives him the opportunity to pump up his ego and show off for his followers.

He reminds me a lot of a former biz partner of mine, no question a very smart guy and very talented, but never satisfied, he wanted desperately to be another Jobs or Brin, he wanted to be center of attention, make people laugh, he wanted to be a tech billionaire, a DJ, a life coach, a gangster - and like Musk, his engagement with people never seemed very organic. He also did the same thing Musk is doing, take charge of a company and talk technical nonsense, like he was smart enough to understand many of the concepts, but he tried to talk like he knew really low level technical details (that's a "cred" thing with the Tech Bros ...)

 

[Eric]

I've puzzled and puzzled 'till my puzzler was sore ...

I've certainly never operated anywhere near the scale of Twitter, or Musk, but I have a reasonable understanding of how these things work, and I just can't figure this out - but I'm approaching it as someone who doesn't have the wealth that allows me to circumvent the law, ignore responsibility, and just generally just fuck up and face zero consequences.

I think Musk legitimately doesn't have much self-awareness, he's so removed from normal human concerns, that he just doesn't think there's any repercussions, that somehow, it will work out for him, that he can just spew nonsense, make with the LOLs, ignore protocols, do things that have severe consequences for everyone around him, but not him.

In his mind, the $1B was admitting to his mistake, it wasn't the money, it was saving face. He'd much rather run the risk of way more loss if it gives him the opportunity to pump up his ego and show off for his followers.

He reminds me a lot of a former biz partner of mine, no question a very smart guy and very talented, but never satisfied, he wanted desperately to be another Jobs or Brin, he wanted to be center of attention, make people laugh, he wanted to be a tech billionaire, a DJ, a life coach, a gangster - and like Musk, his engagement with people never seemed very organic. He also did the same thing Musk is doing, take charge of a company and talk technical nonsense, like he was smart enough to understand many of the concepts, but he tried to talk like he knew really low level technical details (that's a "cred" thing with the Tech Bros ...)

Well said, this really nails him down IMO. He's the type who can raise capital and has grandiose ideas about things without any clue of what actually happens behind the scenes at a developer level, only seeing the bigger picture.

I think FSD (Full Self Driving) is a perfect example of this, never ready for prime time, always in beta and constantly plagued with problems. At its core it's an awesome, innovative and groundbreaking but it can't be released to the general public. He oversold it, talked a good game but anyone who pays extra for it is a dupe.

I can only guess at Tesla he has really smart people constantly trying (and maybe with some success) reeling him in, not to mention investors to answer to. What we're seeing at Twitter is a free for all with him untethered and it's not pretty.

 

[lizkat]

In his mind, the $1B was admitting to his mistake, it wasn't the money, it was saving face. He'd much rather run the risk of way more loss if it gives him the opportunity to pump up his ego and show off for his followers.

Yeah, not wanting to have been perceived as having made a mistake... bingo.

Reminds me of Trump after Charlottesville, and after the only actually acceptable speech he was talked into making (roped, hogtied into making) --reluctantly-- by the then WH chief of staff, staff secretary, some cabinet heads and advisers.

It was the speech that was well received. But, after making it, he switched on the TV and there was somebody on Fox saying something along line of "and now we have the first time in this still young presidency where we see the president having made a course correction..."

Trump then became livid, went completely ballistic, started screaming about he never should have made that speech, it made him look weak, and on and on... and it was after that he really messed up and made some more walking-back "both sides" remarks, ugly enough that white supremacist David Duke tweeted congratulations to Trump.

The fallout from that timeframe was incredibly chaotic with heads of US military forces having to tweet out rebukes of the president, CEOs resigning from the manufacturing and tech councils until Trump disbanded them to stop the embarrassment... and the global stage ending up with Gary Cohn giving an interview to the Financial Times to express his dissenting view from that of Trump regarding Charlottesville, possibly as a condition of his sticking around long enough to finish working on the tax cut legislation. The stock markets teetered for awhile after that interview, since it was not entirely clear Cohn would actually find himself able to continue working with Trump. After all, someone had drawn a swastika on the door of Cohn's daughter's dormitory room at college in the wake of the Charlottesville incident.

All that over Trump's fury that a TV commentator remarked that Trump had "made a course correction."

 

[DT]

Musk is a good product designer, where there's very specific problem to solve / a fixed engineering scope and a marketspace vacuum.

There's a significant consumer marketspace ready for electric cars
These cars need batteries and motors and need to meet other vehicle specific design requirements
There will need to be a large charging network

Those are attainable, design/engineering requirements. I'd say, even though I hesitate to use the "L-word", there was a good bit of luck involved at least in terms of timing.

However, his feasibility meter is busted, so when the problem is vastly more complicated, he severely underestimates the time involved, and fails to understand that you can't just throw money and resources and make it work. Then add in a giant, frail ego, and you've got someone who will make commitments that can't possibly be satisfied.

Hell, we can all be "visionaries" when we don't have to actually execute. I worked at a startup, the core product was pretty neat, had possibility, one of those too early/too late cases, but anyway, the CEO brought in a guy, who was introduced as a "visionary", and sure, his ideas were crazy fun, but just nowhere near viable with the existing tech, and certainly not doable within the ticking clock of investment money being consumed.

I certainly wouldn't suggest stifling thinking out of the box, having vision, "Skating to where the pucks going to be ...", but there are problems, especially those involving people (i.e., Twitter), that aren't overnight solves.

 

[Alli]

For the purposes of transparency and honesty, I feel I must disclose that I made an offer to Musk to purchase Twitter, no questions asked, for five bucks. Since he hasn’t refused the deal, I can only assume he’s still thinking about it.