Twitter implemented verification to resolve the issue of impersonation, and give users confidence that they were interacting with the public entity they thought they were (likely among other reasons). In that sense, “verified” meant “they are who they claim to be”, which is great for building trust in the platform. (The additional moderation tools provided for verified accounts made them attractive even to relatively minor public entities.)
Musk either deliberately reinterpreted or misunderstood “verified” to mean “they are a legitimate non-bot account”. That _could_ be another useful thing to know about an account, but it’s misaligned from its original purpose. _That’s an easy mistake to make if you don’t understand well the problems around account impersonation_, like if your experience is all in domains other than running a content platform.
From there he envisions promoting messages from “real” accounts, and implicitly sinking messages from bots, scammers, spammers, and trolls — a fair enough conclusion. But when he then anticipates that will be valuable enough to most folks to pay $100/year, he overestimates what most people feel is disposable income, what most people would pay to have a “well-moderated” public forum, how people would feel about being asked to pay for a previously free service, how people feel about supporting him personally (especially at this point in his arc), and how people feel about being treated as “less than” by default.
Between his admitted emotional awareness impairment and the fact that his “market research” was likely limited to asking his echo chamber, it’s not hard to imagine _why_ he’s learning lessons the hard way now.
There is no such thing as 'business acumen' running SpaceX and running Twitter are not at all the same thing. It requires totally different skill sets.
Remember that a lot of the "business acumen" for both SpaceX and Tesla has been politics and behind the scenes deals to get billions of dollars of government subsidies to prop up what would otherwise be a business that is hemorrhaging cash.
Not sure if Twitter will be able to get government subsidies to prop it up.
This 'its all subsidies' is just nonsense that isn't true. Its history written by people who people who hate Musk.
The claim that SpaceX and Tesla are only relevant because of govenrment subsidies is just bad business history, its simply not accurate. Or at least its not accurate unless you take the position that all cooperation only exist because of government.
SpaceX got saved in 2008 by getting the COTS contract from NASA, that is clear true however, it wasn't billions and that money was not paid to them directly. They had to achieve checkpoints to get the money. Getting that contract only allowed them to raise the money.
The government certainty has been a big costumer of SpaceX but they got these contracts because they beat the competition and offered far lower prices, not because Musk is good with behind the scenes politics. They competed successful both in the domestic and the international market.
And for Tesla its just false. Tesla got the same tax exemptions any large company gets when investing in a region that just how it works in the US and that's not cash in Tesla account, but rather lower operating cost for the next 20 years. To even attempt to make the claim, you have to basically look at the fuel credit system. But that system isn't a direct subsidy for Tesla, its just the rules for the car industry as a whole. Any company can profit from that system if they want to, some did others didn't. For a few years there was a EV tax credit but only for a very limited number of vehicles that Tesla quickly blew past, but again that was for all car companies and it was a tax credit for people who buy cars, so it wouldn't help Tesla as they were hemorrhaging cash.
Tesla got a loans from the DoE for Model S production. This loan was specifically to set up Model S production, and by that point Tesla had a few options to finance production it was not a bail out because they were running out of cash. Tesla paid this loan back and the govenrment made profit. Under the same program Ford and GM also got much bigger loans and have still not paid them back, they had to ask the govenrment multiple time to extend the loan period).
And the claim that Musk business constantly hemorrhage cash is also mostly false. If you sit down and compare SpaceX to all the other rocket companies before and since, you will discover that SpaceX is was incredibly low cash operation. To give you some comparison, Virgin Orbit spent something like 400M to get to Orbit with a small rocket. SpaceX had something like 100M. RocketLab spent about the same amount as SpaceX but for a smaller rocket with less potential for upgrades. Other companies like Relativity have received billions in funding before they ever launch a rocket. Firefly went bankrupt and then got 300M of millions of investment to launch their first rocket.
What SpaceX did and with how little cash they did it, in a political situation way less friendly then what it was a decade later is astonishing.
We can make the same argument for Tesla. Compare Tesla to the EV Boom that happened in the last 4-5 years, all these other companies like Nikola, Lordstown, Rivian, Lucid and so on were swimming in cash often getting 100s of millions and sometimes 10s of billions in cash. In hindsight and what we are seeing now is that Tesla was incredibly cash and capital efficient.
I never said that it was all subsidies. I said that his other successful businesses have been propped up by government cash, which is objectively true. If it hadn't been for government contracts or tax exemptions there wouldn't be a SpaceX or a Tesla, or they would have struggled way more and been a fraction of the size. It's not necessarily a bad thing that his businesses were enabled by big government help, as there is a clear national interest in having more space travel and electric car options.
The problem is if Elon has become too overconfident in entering difficult business areas because his companies have been saved multiple times by government contracts and deals. Does he start to think he can save any business in any difficult space because he pulled off SpaceX and Tesla? Is the government going to bail out Twitter for national security interests if he messes up?
I remember some statements around pricing for Tesla models by him that made me wonder (I think it was something like 'a Tesla model should cost the same amount everywhere on earth', which struck me as both admirable and naive), but having built up multiple billion-dolllar companies it's hard to deny that he must have made a lot of good decisions.
I think there may very well be such a thing as business acumen, I know several people who were succesful building multiple businesses in different industries (nowhere near a scale that you'd have heard of them, but still). Some skills like negotiation, sales/marketing/PR, motivating employees, being good with numbers,... are universally useful for all kinds of business.
Business acumen seems to be a pretty broad term. There is a subset of skills useful in many situations and for many business but maybe for some business some specific skills that are outside of 'business acumen' were the trigger for success.
Maybe Musk has bad 'business acumen' but is good at coordinating engineering teams and that lead to the success of SpaceX and Tesla but doesn't work for Twitter because its not really an engineering problem.
Sure there is. A business is a business, obviously you have to know how bring in experienced people (or not fire the ones that are experienced), that's a basic part of business, any business of a large size.
Ah the old hater line. Always good to see that the classics never go out of style.
Gwynne Shotwell herself of course wouldn't agree with this line of argument, go listen to interviews with her.
Shotwell makes no claim that she was driving force behind Falcon 1 or Falcon 9, she just took over company management when Falcon 9 was already started flying and Musk was in full control of Falcon 9 development.
As she herself said, its easy to sell a rocket that beats competition by a huge margin, has incredibly high reliability and a high launch rate.
The same goes for govenrment contracts, if you bid almost 40% lower because you just have better technology and better engineering processes, something Shotwell was never responsible for, you have a huge advantage.
Shotwell is of course great, a fantastic operator, and of course she was hand picked by Musk for that roll. He put here in position to manage day to day operations so he could focus on the most important engineering projects.
So even if your claim is true that Shotwell runs SpaceX, Musk would still get a lot of credit.
That makes no sense. This isn't some 4d chess move that requires grandiose speculation to understand. Elon made a huge mistake and is now floundering in a panic. I'm sure he thought David Sacks would come in with a bunch of brilliant ideas to fix the company, but as is almost always the case things are a lot more complicated in reality than sideline shit-talkers like Elon and Sacks make it out to be.
An alternate conspiracy is that what Musk is doing is working. He signals to the company that the era of "move fast and break things" has arrived, he creates a ton of drama and attention which may drive, he tests a personal theory about what would work, and he starts to build understanding about the limits of the business.
I have no idea what's really going on - but I'm interested in the results. I think 3-5 years will reveal whether this was a catastrophic mistake, a brilliant plan, or something in between. "Launch a new feature, observe the problems, throttle the new feature while you resolve the problems" doesn't seem obviously insane to me.
Twitter needs to generate roughly a billion dollars a year in additional cashflow just to service the debt Musk saddled it with. They already weren’t profitable, but let’s say that they were breakeven and that ad revenue would be sufficient to cover non-debt costs.
There’s absolutely no way that 100,000,000+ people are going to sign up for twitter blue; they would be exceptionally fortunate to get a tenth of that figure. His other ideas are chickenfeed, so how does he get to an extra billion in revenue? How does he do that when he seems to be actively antagonizing twitter’s only meaningful source of revenue?
I'm not saying that it will work or that this is a good plan or anything. I really have no idea. I'm saying that it might be part of a plan and one way to know is to wait and see if it works out.
If someone is playing a video game you've never played, and you see them mashing the controls in a random way, it's possible they have no idea what they're doing. If you wait a bit and watch you can see if they lose, which would validate the theory they didn't know what they were doing, or if they win - which would suggest they did know what they were doing.
I think we have already waited long enough with Twitter to conclude that the emperor, in this case, has no clothes.
Twitter isn't like SpaceX or Tesla: there aren't enormous government contracts, subsidies, or climate credits to prop up its finances. There is no plausible replacement for the advertising revenue his style of leadership is actively alienating, and there is a real risk that his strategy is exposing Twitter to enormous FTC sanctions given that they are already under a consent decree.
It is much more likely that he's deeply in over his head and floundering than it is that he has a master plan he can only execute by taking a blowtorch to Twitter's current business structure. How much worse does it have to get before that theory is validated?
It's been a week or two, hasn't it? How is that possibly long enough to arrive at a judgement. Twitter under Elon is just getting started and there are no quantifiable results yet. Reaching a conclusion now, before there is any real data, is unreasonable.
Suppose shedding 4k employees saves about a billion dollars a year, and the increased attention and activity brings in more users, and the increased users attract more advertisers? If Twitter Blue reaches 10 million subscribers there is another billion in revenue - and maybe more if you can more profitably sell ads targeted to people who pay for Twitter.
Again, I am not saying the above is what I think will happen. I genuinely have no idea. I'm saying the above seems at least like a plausible path that is still open to Twitter becoming stable and/or profitable. It's also possible that the chaos and losing so many employees will cause Twitter to break apart and crash - but we haven't seen that yet. Or that the place will become so toxic advertisers will refuse to advertise there and it will never be able to make money and die. Or many other negative possibilities.
It is simply premature to be writing the death certificate for a patient who is still alive and screaming.
Comments
Almost like Musk has no clue what he's doing, just winging it — and doing a poor job of it.
It's like he has no business acumen at all. And I know that's not true. I think he's intentionally destroying the company for some unknown reason.
It can be _true enough_.
Twitter implemented verification to resolve the issue of impersonation, and give users confidence that they were interacting with the public entity they thought they were (likely among other reasons). In that sense, “verified” meant “they are who they claim to be”, which is great for building trust in the platform. (The additional moderation tools provided for verified accounts made them attractive even to relatively minor public entities.)
Musk either deliberately reinterpreted or misunderstood “verified” to mean “they are a legitimate non-bot account”. That _could_ be another useful thing to know about an account, but it’s misaligned from its original purpose. _That’s an easy mistake to make if you don’t understand well the problems around account impersonation_, like if your experience is all in domains other than running a content platform.
From there he envisions promoting messages from “real” accounts, and implicitly sinking messages from bots, scammers, spammers, and trolls — a fair enough conclusion. But when he then anticipates that will be valuable enough to most folks to pay $100/year, he overestimates what most people feel is disposable income, what most people would pay to have a “well-moderated” public forum, how people would feel about being asked to pay for a previously free service, how people feel about supporting him personally (especially at this point in his arc), and how people feel about being treated as “less than” by default.
Between his admitted emotional awareness impairment and the fact that his “market research” was likely limited to asking his echo chamber, it’s not hard to imagine _why_ he’s learning lessons the hard way now.
There is no such thing as 'business acumen' running SpaceX and running Twitter are not at all the same thing. It requires totally different skill sets.
Remember that a lot of the "business acumen" for both SpaceX and Tesla has been politics and behind the scenes deals to get billions of dollars of government subsidies to prop up what would otherwise be a business that is hemorrhaging cash.
Not sure if Twitter will be able to get government subsidies to prop it up.
This 'its all subsidies' is just nonsense that isn't true. Its history written by people who people who hate Musk.
The claim that SpaceX and Tesla are only relevant because of govenrment subsidies is just bad business history, its simply not accurate. Or at least its not accurate unless you take the position that all cooperation only exist because of government.
SpaceX got saved in 2008 by getting the COTS contract from NASA, that is clear true however, it wasn't billions and that money was not paid to them directly. They had to achieve checkpoints to get the money. Getting that contract only allowed them to raise the money.
The government certainty has been a big costumer of SpaceX but they got these contracts because they beat the competition and offered far lower prices, not because Musk is good with behind the scenes politics. They competed successful both in the domestic and the international market.
And for Tesla its just false. Tesla got the same tax exemptions any large company gets when investing in a region that just how it works in the US and that's not cash in Tesla account, but rather lower operating cost for the next 20 years. To even attempt to make the claim, you have to basically look at the fuel credit system. But that system isn't a direct subsidy for Tesla, its just the rules for the car industry as a whole. Any company can profit from that system if they want to, some did others didn't. For a few years there was a EV tax credit but only for a very limited number of vehicles that Tesla quickly blew past, but again that was for all car companies and it was a tax credit for people who buy cars, so it wouldn't help Tesla as they were hemorrhaging cash.
Tesla got a loans from the DoE for Model S production. This loan was specifically to set up Model S production, and by that point Tesla had a few options to finance production it was not a bail out because they were running out of cash. Tesla paid this loan back and the govenrment made profit. Under the same program Ford and GM also got much bigger loans and have still not paid them back, they had to ask the govenrment multiple time to extend the loan period).
And the claim that Musk business constantly hemorrhage cash is also mostly false. If you sit down and compare SpaceX to all the other rocket companies before and since, you will discover that SpaceX is was incredibly low cash operation. To give you some comparison, Virgin Orbit spent something like 400M to get to Orbit with a small rocket. SpaceX had something like 100M. RocketLab spent about the same amount as SpaceX but for a smaller rocket with less potential for upgrades. Other companies like Relativity have received billions in funding before they ever launch a rocket. Firefly went bankrupt and then got 300M of millions of investment to launch their first rocket.
What SpaceX did and with how little cash they did it, in a political situation way less friendly then what it was a decade later is astonishing.
We can make the same argument for Tesla. Compare Tesla to the EV Boom that happened in the last 4-5 years, all these other companies like Nikola, Lordstown, Rivian, Lucid and so on were swimming in cash often getting 100s of millions and sometimes 10s of billions in cash. In hindsight and what we are seeing now is that Tesla was incredibly cash and capital efficient.
I never said that it was all subsidies. I said that his other successful businesses have been propped up by government cash, which is objectively true. If it hadn't been for government contracts or tax exemptions there wouldn't be a SpaceX or a Tesla, or they would have struggled way more and been a fraction of the size. It's not necessarily a bad thing that his businesses were enabled by big government help, as there is a clear national interest in having more space travel and electric car options.
The problem is if Elon has become too overconfident in entering difficult business areas because his companies have been saved multiple times by government contracts and deals. Does he start to think he can save any business in any difficult space because he pulled off SpaceX and Tesla? Is the government going to bail out Twitter for national security interests if he messes up?
I remember some statements around pricing for Tesla models by him that made me wonder (I think it was something like 'a Tesla model should cost the same amount everywhere on earth', which struck me as both admirable and naive), but having built up multiple billion-dolllar companies it's hard to deny that he must have made a lot of good decisions.
I think there may very well be such a thing as business acumen, I know several people who were succesful building multiple businesses in different industries (nowhere near a scale that you'd have heard of them, but still). Some skills like negotiation, sales/marketing/PR, motivating employees, being good with numbers,... are universally useful for all kinds of business.
Business acumen seems to be a pretty broad term. There is a subset of skills useful in many situations and for many business but maybe for some business some specific skills that are outside of 'business acumen' were the trigger for success.
Maybe Musk has bad 'business acumen' but is good at coordinating engineering teams and that lead to the success of SpaceX and Tesla but doesn't work for Twitter because its not really an engineering problem.
Sure there is. A business is a business, obviously you have to know how bring in experienced people (or not fire the ones that are experienced), that's a basic part of business, any business of a large size.
Gwynne Shotwell runs SpaceX. Elon just takes credit for it.
Ah the old hater line. Always good to see that the classics never go out of style.
Gwynne Shotwell herself of course wouldn't agree with this line of argument, go listen to interviews with her.
Shotwell makes no claim that she was driving force behind Falcon 1 or Falcon 9, she just took over company management when Falcon 9 was already started flying and Musk was in full control of Falcon 9 development.
As she herself said, its easy to sell a rocket that beats competition by a huge margin, has incredibly high reliability and a high launch rate.
The same goes for govenrment contracts, if you bid almost 40% lower because you just have better technology and better engineering processes, something Shotwell was never responsible for, you have a huge advantage.
Shotwell is of course great, a fantastic operator, and of course she was hand picked by Musk for that roll. He put here in position to manage day to day operations so he could focus on the most important engineering projects.
So even if your claim is true that Shotwell runs SpaceX, Musk would still get a lot of credit.
Better a hater than a groveling syncophant.
That makes no sense. This isn't some 4d chess move that requires grandiose speculation to understand. Elon made a huge mistake and is now floundering in a panic. I'm sure he thought David Sacks would come in with a bunch of brilliant ideas to fix the company, but as is almost always the case things are a lot more complicated in reality than sideline shit-talkers like Elon and Sacks make it out to be.
What boundless optimism.
It's Elon Musk. Ofcourse he can't be lacking in any respect. He's a genius.
An alternate conspiracy is that what Musk is doing is working. He signals to the company that the era of "move fast and break things" has arrived, he creates a ton of drama and attention which may drive, he tests a personal theory about what would work, and he starts to build understanding about the limits of the business.
I have no idea what's really going on - but I'm interested in the results. I think 3-5 years will reveal whether this was a catastrophic mistake, a brilliant plan, or something in between. "Launch a new feature, observe the problems, throttle the new feature while you resolve the problems" doesn't seem obviously insane to me.
Twitter needs to generate roughly a billion dollars a year in additional cashflow just to service the debt Musk saddled it with. They already weren’t profitable, but let’s say that they were breakeven and that ad revenue would be sufficient to cover non-debt costs.
There’s absolutely no way that 100,000,000+ people are going to sign up for twitter blue; they would be exceptionally fortunate to get a tenth of that figure. His other ideas are chickenfeed, so how does he get to an extra billion in revenue? How does he do that when he seems to be actively antagonizing twitter’s only meaningful source of revenue?
I'm not saying that it will work or that this is a good plan or anything. I really have no idea. I'm saying that it might be part of a plan and one way to know is to wait and see if it works out.
If someone is playing a video game you've never played, and you see them mashing the controls in a random way, it's possible they have no idea what they're doing. If you wait a bit and watch you can see if they lose, which would validate the theory they didn't know what they were doing, or if they win - which would suggest they did know what they were doing.
I think we have already waited long enough with Twitter to conclude that the emperor, in this case, has no clothes.
Twitter isn't like SpaceX or Tesla: there aren't enormous government contracts, subsidies, or climate credits to prop up its finances. There is no plausible replacement for the advertising revenue his style of leadership is actively alienating, and there is a real risk that his strategy is exposing Twitter to enormous FTC sanctions given that they are already under a consent decree.
It is much more likely that he's deeply in over his head and floundering than it is that he has a master plan he can only execute by taking a blowtorch to Twitter's current business structure. How much worse does it have to get before that theory is validated?
It's been a week or two, hasn't it? How is that possibly long enough to arrive at a judgement. Twitter under Elon is just getting started and there are no quantifiable results yet. Reaching a conclusion now, before there is any real data, is unreasonable.
Suppose shedding 4k employees saves about a billion dollars a year, and the increased attention and activity brings in more users, and the increased users attract more advertisers? If Twitter Blue reaches 10 million subscribers there is another billion in revenue - and maybe more if you can more profitably sell ads targeted to people who pay for Twitter.
Again, I am not saying the above is what I think will happen. I genuinely have no idea. I'm saying the above seems at least like a plausible path that is still open to Twitter becoming stable and/or profitable. It's also possible that the chaos and losing so many employees will cause Twitter to break apart and crash - but we haven't seen that yet. Or that the place will become so toxic advertisers will refuse to advertise there and it will never be able to make money and die. Or many other negative possibilities.
It is simply premature to be writing the death certificate for a patient who is still alive and screaming.
moved from 4d chess to 5d chess.