So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889762#Comment_119889762

Just looks like Good Publicity to me!! 🤣🙄🤭

Like, yeah he's rich, but that's not an inoculation from Stupid; dunno why that seems to be ignored.

Even the massively wealthy make mistakes: Christ Zuckerberg has sunk billions IIRC into his Quixotic VR enterprise, to use a recent example

Wolf359f

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889763#Comment_119889763

Guess he can introduce a Twitter blue plus, and have custom @twitter.com email addresses. Least you know the email is from a verified someone who paid!

Rosalinda Eyes

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119888797#Comment_119888797

I heard on Claire Byrne tis morning that another reason advertisers might pull out is that the site is at risk of people posting defamatory content such as violence and child pornography without it being taken down.

Brussels Sprout

I find it bemusing that some people appear to be willing to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, on absolutely any of his, objectively, terrible decisions, just because they perceive him to be on the same "side" as them politically. I think at this stage, if he dynamited all of the offices and servers and wiped all of the source code they'd be creating accounts on Mastodon telling people what a genius he was and how they always hated twitter anyway and this was in fact a 4D-chess business move.

He could shoot an employee in broad daylight in the middle of Times Square...

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889848#Comment_119889848

That's a key reason - Not just violence/child porn , but anything bad.

No advertiser wants their product appearing on a screen next to anything bad - It doesn't have to be at the really bad end of violence or child porn.

Advertising is about selling a "vision" and a "lifestyle" and having their products associated with a life that people aspire to.

Having your product appear in the banner of Twitter alongside something the complete opposite of "aspirational" is not something that any of them want.

Firing most of their moderation staff and Musk saying that he wanted to dial back on moderation in general in pursuit of his "free-speech absolutist" vision has unsurprisingly got advertisers running for the exits.

In a down market , they want to be certain that the money they spend on advertising hits the spot - Twitter cannot provide them with anything approaching that kind of guarantee today.

Larbre34

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889763#Comment_119889763

Spacekaren.net.ru

'This domain is under deposit reserve'

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889694#Comment_119889694

Common sense would have advised any of us not to invest in a car company that was planning to take a Lotus chassis and fit it with electric motors and batteries, and do it in California from all places, yet here we are.

Bass Reeves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889727#Comment_119889727

So we are back to factos ''random boardies may be unware of''.

Yes it possible to increase revenue by reducing headcount, that the whole f@@king point of reducing headcount.

However if by your actions you severely impact revenues which may not recover then the whole excercise is futile.

We ready had another random boardies ( auditor that was involved in corporate takeover's) explain how not looking at how the company is run/works and how is most similar situations the buyers do nothing until they understand this. Musk has lost substantial advertising revenue because he decided to get rid of the moderation department, and reduced revenue streams by advertising managers leaving.

We hear of monetisation of users. But any attempt so far has been a disaster. As a randomer myself I fail to see this as the goose that will lay the golden egg. TV, film and video companies are charging 100/ year and ate struggling to move beyond that. SKY the total monetized TV is struggling with hacking of it streaming services that allows free use of it product. Howany will pay 50/ year for what is access to a news service

When you look at the lack of due diligence by Musk it really shows his ineptitude. It funny this one act would have saved him. Yes it would have cost a billion to do excercise that option but the tech price collapse would have happened while it was in progress

AndrewJRenko

Perfectly normal behaviour, nothing to see here

https://www.businessinsider.com/pronatalism-elon-musk-simone-malcolm-collins-underpopulation-breeding-tech-2022-11

Just a dullard with money

https://twitter.com/JoeBrolly1993/status/1593527546926305281

Larbre34

Hear me out...

Burty330

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889692#Comment_119889692

By Musks own own quantifiable words huh? Funny how you would take that quote and run with it as if Musks own words are ironclad facts and therefore cannot be disputed in anyway.

Yet in the exact same quote he cites activist groups as the reason for the pause in advertising , a claim you stated has no basis in reality whatsoever. So the one tweet you constantly use as a source of truth is also a tweet you claim is a total non-truth. . 🤣🤣

What about Musk claim that Twitter has seen record high growth. By his own admission so it has to be true , right? lol

Quantum Erasure

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890080#Comment_119890080

You talking about the subject of the article or the way the writer comes across?

erlichbachman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889979#Comment_119889979

Reducing head count cuts cost, it has nothing to do with revenue.

It seem everyone (random boardsies) assumes the guy took over and made changes of a multi national company without first assessing which changes needed to be made. Absolutely no proof of this of course, other than reversing some changes that didn’t work, but still, let’s all jump on the bandwagon of the guy who hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890195#Comment_119890195

If we accept what Musk says as true what we have is more users , but less advertisers - Which is an objectively terrible place to be.

Basically it's saying "We had our biggest crowd every in the theatre last night , but most of them didn't buy a ticket because we sacked the security guards and left the fire door open."

It's also objectively true that right now is a busy time for Twitter and Social media in that most of it's users are in the US and they've just had an election which is something that drives more users for a short period of time.

If they manage to retain enough staff to keep the lights on and they do actually re-open the offices on Monday as planned , let's see what the quarterly numbers look like which would help flatten out the spikes of recent events.

Let's see if the advertisers return to Twitter to get their products in front of all these alleged new users.

AdamD

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890334#Comment_119890334

No proof? Dear god get your tongue out of his arse

Burty330

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890354#Comment_119890354

But advertisers have not left twitter. Im willing to be proven wrong... awaiting the details.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890334#Comment_119890334

No, what we're saying is that it's a physical impossibility for him to have made that assessment correctly in the time-frame he made it in.

The duration of an assessment to determine a decision of the magnitude he made is measured in months , not the days he took.

I don't care how "brilliant" he might be.

Also , other than firing 50% of the staff he has reversed every other decision he has announced thus far.

Paid for Blue Check-marks ,"Official" Check-marks, Cancelling Work From Home, Disabling Micro- Services.

All announced , all cancelled or walked back almost immediately.

Podge_irl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889979#Comment_119889979

The 1Bn payout was not a simple "get-out" clause, it still needed cause I believe.

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890333#Comment_119890333

I’m talking about the bizarre world of Musk, surrounded by yes men who have convinced him that his sperm is truly sacred.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890389#Comment_119890389

I thought we were accepting what Musk has said as fact?- He has said that Advertising revenue has collapsed.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880

We can argue about whether it's down to "activists" or not , but the man himself has said revenue has collapsed - It was why he had such a hard-on to launch the "blue-checks" for cash model.

As of of the most recently available accounts for Twitter , advertising is 80%+ of all income.

Podge_irl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890195#Comment_119890195

Musk is in a position to objectively state that ad revenue has fallen. That it is due to "activists" is just conjecture that has been refuted by a number of people who are actually in a position to know.

Gregor Samsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889956#Comment_119889956

His initial investment in Tesla was $6.5 million. He had earned more than $100 million from the sale of PayPal, so it wasn't a huge proportion of his wealth. He's estimated to have put in about $200 million in total over the years, which isn't a huge amount in relative terms. And it has certainly paid off well, as he ended up with $20 billion in cash after selling Tesla stock.

Musk's personal potion of the Twitter buyout was $33.5 billion. It's quite a different investment, quite a different risk.

screamer

I’m sure the bould Elon is very worried about what we all think of him here on boards…… all this stuff though, it’s just business. He’s in business to make money not friends. It’s what most people in business are in it for. I really don’t get the outrage, a bloated over valued tech company gets a dose of reality and people are up in arms….. it’s just business. Yes it’s hard on the people losing their jobs, but that’s always a possibility in any private company job. Though I will say, what a strange investment choice for Musk, all the social platforms tank in turn, strange to invest in twitter, he could have just setup a newer fancier platform quietly and I’d guess had a better investment return

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890469#Comment_119890469

It was exactly 2 weeks ago to the day that this was posted.

And now your saying that he wasn't telling the truth , that advertising revenue hasn't collapsed and he was just trolling.

Jesus.. There really is no helping people out of the rabbit hole sometimes.

Also - What advertisers have pulled out?

Let's see

• United Airlines
• General Motors
• Pfizer
• Audi
• Farvel
• Carlsberg
• Balenciaga
• Mondelez
• General Mills
• Volkswagen
• Chipotle
• Ford
• CVS
• Nintendo
• O2
• Hyundai
• Dominos Pizza

And those are just the ones I can find with a few minutes work on google that have publicly announced that they have stopped advertising on Twitter.

So yeah , it's a tweet I'm happy to "hitch my wagon to"

erlichbachman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890369#Comment_119890369

Excellent contribution

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890497#Comment_119890497

I'm not outraged; I'd love nothing more if Twitter became extinct because it has been a pox on humanity IMO.

However, the most public and eccentric billionaire just bought the biggest (social) media platform on the planet, for way more than it was worth at the time - and is making some really pronounced, bizarre decisions that literally had the service break during the last couple of weeks; it's all too bizarre not to stop, stare and go "WTF is going on?".

Best $8 ever spent.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/eli-lilly-ceo-says-insulin-tweet-flap-probably-signals-need-to-bring-down-cost/

Bass Reeves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890419#Comment_119890419

The 1billion was the cost of doing doing due diligence if he pulled out. Ya he might have had to show cause. However if he had done DD the bot claim he made

Ight have stood up a d been enough for him to pull the bid. Usually at DD you will always find a reason to pull the bid of you really want to. There will always e something in the books that is not 100% correct

kerplun k

I think at this point, no matter which way you look at it, it’s pretty conclusive that this has been a massive f**K up from Musk. You can debate Musks characteristics until the cows come home, but for me, there's no denying that this has been a complete cluster**k that will no doubt tarnish his legacy. He'll be lucky to recover 1/4 of what he's spent on it.

magicbastarder

in less than two hours since trading opened this morning, tesla's share price has fallen 2.5%.

Burty330

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890524#Comment_119890524

Balenciaga used their own twitter page to promote themselves. Since its a free platform they were not paying Twitter to advertisers their products. The same applies to Audi and VW. Why buy ad space when you can create a page for free?

Here's where Twitter gets its ad revenue from. Who on that list has pulled out?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1112281/us-twitter-advertisers-ranked-by-ad-spend/

Bass Reeves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890497#Comment_119890497

I do not know where you get thia outrage, most on here ayte giving an analysis of why what Musk is doing will fail and cost him billions.

It purely business analysis and looking at the decisions he is making and why they are failing.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890569#Comment_119890569

A complete shltshow, but I really think people overplay how important the money is when you have 100bn+ left even if it turns to zero. Bruised ego aside, I'd rather be him and lose 99.99% of my net worth, than be me and lose 10k.

timmyntc

After the scope of the layoffs to date, and seeing that twitter the platform is largely working as is - perhaps the level of staffing at twitter was not actually necessary.

Plenty of stories from people in industry about how working for twitter was a pisstake, you could go months without doing anything of value

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890577#Comment_119890577

It's been on a pretty steep downward trend for the last few months , running quite a bit ahead of the general stock slump - S&P 500 is down about 7% in the last 3 months , Tesla is down over 40% in the same period.

It's down 9% this week alone.

Stock holders are not happy with Musk in general these days,

Boggles

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890616#Comment_119890616

The coding is frozen, it is basically running on autopilot.

Now the problem is when things need to changed, upgraded or a problem happens. Because from what I have being reading, a lot of the senior engineers didn't react too well to "click here or else" and have jumped ship.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890582#Comment_119890582

Balenciaga closed their account entirely

And from your list - Nestle who were the largest advertisers have been advised by their Ad agency to stop using Twitter as it's considered "High Risk" , this after they had already drastically reduced their ad spend with twitter over the Summer.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890654#Comment_119890654

From experience and extrapolation, there's a remarkable number of systems, websites and general software out there that function - but which are incredibly brittle, due to the fact the one guy who wrote the thing, left the company aeons ago, and now nobody's quite sure how it works. Or they were over-engineered to a degree that they're impossible to change, except around the margins and with some "developer magic". All that's probably survivable if you're some small company with a modest turnaround - but yeah; Twitter? As you say, the moment something needs to change the (apparent) brain-drain is going to cause problems. Can't ask the new guy with 5 months under their belt and no senior devs to pick brains with, to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Unless they have top-notch documentation. And even then: aside from the fact software engineers hate writing documentation, there's just that irreplaceable X Factor of a group of experienced professionals; those who know the kinks, the edge-cases and "feel" of a tech-stack that make development easier. If these reports are true, and the numbers vacating the engineering teams are real - that's a huge problem not easily fixed. There are some things you can't throw money at. Musk is running a Software company and fúcking over his Developers; that's not smart.

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890616#Comment_119890616

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-jTPX2oh8

...

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890654#Comment_119890654

Yeah..

It's like saying "I had my car serviced a few weeks ago and it's still running fine - I'll never need to service it again"

Something will break, It always does.

And given the media attention every hacker on the planet will fancy having a go off the Twitter back-end and without the Engineers and architects to plug holes and apply patches and fixes etc. they will get in.

joseywhales

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119888286#Comment_119888286

Those people will find work in a day if they're desperate, the hard part is finding a job you are motivated by and obviously with a high salary and works with your personal life. But there will always be a demand for developers even mid recession.

one armed dwarf

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890616#Comment_119890616

Well it's not like they were constantly shovelling coal into the fire. But if updates need to be performed, sweeping changes which usher in the features Elon needs to complete this pivot, it will be immensely more difficult to asses the side effects of those changes with such a massive brain drain. Side effects that can break existing functionality

You need the people who know how the system works to evolve and iterate the platform. What's happening here is twitter probably won't fall over overnight, but at the very least it will lose an immense amount of velocity which will smother whatever innovations Elon has in mind here.

That's just when it comes to feature development. But even maintaining a codebase requires work to be performed from time to time, if a module has a security flaw and needs to be updated. New twitter is going to at the very least be facing some profound struggles, everything will move much more slowly

AdamD

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890525#Comment_119890525

I mean you think there's no proof that what Musk has done hasn't been fully thought out in advance. What's the point in me actually debating that? At some point the most simple explanation is the correct one and its blindingly obvious he thought absolutely none of this through.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890757#Comment_119890757

Well there is a non-zero chance he is spite-killing the platform because he was forced to buy. The man has clearly lost the rationality we'd expect from anyone in a position he's in.

Man Vs ManUre

The minions are keeping Twitter going, these little yellow guys do all the hardcore graft.

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890779#Comment_119890779

Not out of spite, but for practical reasons: his spending on it didn't end with those 44 billions, it also costs money to keep the lights on. So it's either dim the lights to the bare minimum, or shut it down altogether.

Fred Cryton

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890779#Comment_119890779

Musk is being very rational and if you don't see if you're part of the problem.

He has just got rid of probably 60-70% of the staff...and the thing still works. In other words 60-70% of the staff were completely surplus to requirements.

No-one is irreplaceable....in fact the uncomfortable truth is if YOU were fired from your job tomorrow, either the company would get by just fine without you or the guy they get to replace you would do it better, due to to fresh eyes and higher motivation.

When he turns Twitter into a massive catch all platform (X) worth $250 billion, and refloats it on the stock market in a few years, his $44bn purchase will look like the bargain of the century.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119890707#Comment_119890707

The guy waving the yellow flag at the bike is the best bit.