This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply. Nilay Patel, writing at The Verge: You fucked up real good, kiddo.Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars. Best article on the acquisition I’ve read so far. more Not all embedded content is displayed here. You can view the original to see embedded videos, tweets, etc.
fucking love Nilay. He, and Scott Galloway have been banging on this drum for months now. Nilay has great insight from the tech pov, and Scott mutilates this deal from a financial pov. Based on market trends, the value of twitter should be about $10-15/share and he closed at $54.20 because he's fucking stupid and thought it was funny. But taking it over today around $33B in the equity Musk had to come up with just got eviscerated. This acquisition is probably one of the worst in history, second only to AOL buying TimeWarner.
Can’t say I have any understanding how of buying businesses work but I find Twitter utterly fascinating. It’s simply an open world chat room, which sounds useful, and yet I’m baffled at how big it’s gotten (after dwelling for so long at the bottom of the social media totem pole). For the same reason, and given how seemingly simple Twitter is, I’m surprised it’s not worth more (though I was shocked to learn how many employees it has, let alone how many will likely lose their jobs). There was also a time when I found Musk equally fascinating and on some level inspiring, and yet, is there another person alive who demonstrates the concept of multiple intelligences so brazenly? My mind leans towards him just being very good at driving attention, but I once would’ve said the same about trump until I realized how calculating his stupidity was (which feels weird to say).
I hate Elon, but this is surely disingenuous at best? At what point has Musk ever suggested anything to the contrary? That's why he used the user base as a reason to pull out of the sale. He bangs on about it being the town centre or whatever, but he certainly doesn't talk about the tech behind Twitter ever. Because there's nothing special or innovative about it particularly.
Bad take. I’m glad Musk bought it so that he can burn it to the ground. Horribly biased article and really went at it from the wrong direction. Really doesn’t understand why it was bought in the first place lol
The guy has many faults and is very dramatic but you have to give him some credit for bankrolling Starlink in the Ukraine war, which is more or less a Global fight for democracy. I can't speak to how much bad he has done in the world so I can't speak to his karmic standing, but he deserves credit for Ukraine (and yes I know about all the recent drama where he said he was going to pull out).
Only far leftist are mad he bought this and think he’s stupid. The rest of the world, everyday joe doesn’t care
The use of the n-word on Twitter jumped 500% since the deal went through. What a fine accomplishment for Elon and free speech.
I want to believe so badly that he’s sincere about this but everything leading up to this says otherwise.
Musk bought Twitter for the same reason Trump ran in 2016. He’s a thin-skinned megalomaniac who likes to throw elbows while pretending to be above the partisan fray. He’s also the living embodiment of Dunning-Kruger, blithely confident that he can intuit the solution to nearly any problem through savvy rather than expertise. He knows absolutely nothing about effective content moderation and ignores (or in this case, fires) anyone who could properly educate him on the matter. In other words, he is 100% going to fuck this up.
Musk has the media literacy of a 14-year-old groyper and shouldn’t be trusted to moderate a corkboard in an office breakroom, let alone a social media platform.
The more the news airs what people say on Twitter, the more politicians basically debut their policies on Twitter, and the more companies continue to drive people to Twitter, the more of a money bank it will be. Even if the asset itself isn’t that exciting, the more eyes that are on it means the more advertisers will be willing to pay for their messages to be promoted. If done correctly, Twitter could be even more massive than it already is.
Especially from one of the most prolific liars in Silicon Valley. Elon Musk Is Pathologically Full of Sh*t
That might be the case but that’s why the purchase was smart. Plus even though I basically don’t agree with anything that conservatives have been pushing on Twitter, conservatives do have a point about the censoring on Twitter. That said I do agree with censoring Trump when he was president after Jan 6. But now? Not so much. Especially since horrible mouth pieces from China haven’t been censored and yet Twitter is censoring right wing tweets. I may not agree with the tweets that are censored but it looks really bad. I’m glad this is happening. Hopefully it won’t shift too far to the other side. If it does then that will be very unfortunate.