Sure, you’ve probably made some purchase decisions you regret, but have you ever just set fire to 44 billion dollars? No? Why would anyone?
Ah right. Well, when you purchase a company – for ‘da lulz’ or some other reason, you pick up a whole bunch of things as part of the package deal. Let’s take a quick gander at what Elon paid money for – and then take a look at how he’s systematically destroying each one.
The Intellectual Property. Buy a company and you get both their code, and you get the creations they’ve created. In the games industry, it’s usually around the creations – Microsoft is much more interested in owning Call of Duty and World of Warcraft than any piece of Activision code. Not so here – Twitter’s IP is almost exclusively code. And Elon owns it now.
And that’s not nothing! As simple as Twitter appears on the outside, it’s an incredibly complex organism behind the scenes, especially to operate at scale. There’s a reason why no serious Twitter competitor has risen up in more than a decade. Twitter is the only codebase that can really do what it does – and is within a year of doing so.
So on the face this is good, right? Heh, we’ll get back to that.
The Customers.
Twitter had a very large and very loyal audience. They aren’t loyal anymore. Elon has made his plans clear for Twitter: It’s going to be an active source of disinformation, it’s going to be actively hostile to minority members, it’s going to be full of spammers and harassment is going to go relatively unpunished.
He’s also pushing to make it a more expensive service, expecting the majority of users to pay $8 a month (and promising those who don’t will get a severely degraded service). This is in a media landscape where everything similar is free.
Competitors like Mastodon and Hive are seeing massive growth in response. If the free service continues to degrade, people will not stick around.
The Actual Customers
But wait – very few Twitter users actually give Twitter any money. Twitter is actually in the advertising business, and Twitter depends on their money to keep the lights on. Elon’s going to need to not only keep existing advertisers as well as grow this revenue base and possibly raise prices if he’s going to keep Twitter going, now that he’s saddled the company with enormous debts that require servicing. How’s that going?
Yep, Twitter advertisers are leaving Twitter en masse. Elon is quick to blame ‘activists’ and not the fact that he’s turning it into a den of misinformation and virulent hate.
The Content
Every day, a handful of notable people – ‘blue checkmarks’ if you will – grace Twitter with their presence and provide the free content of whatever comes to their mind. Millions of people are attracted to Twitter so that they can see what people like Stephen King, Trent Reznor and Kathy Griffin have to say. Elon Musk has made it clear that these are all ‘elitists’, has worked hard to show them the door, and has pissed on them while they’re gone.
What’s going to fill in the gap? Why, some of the worst people in the world, of course. Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate were unbanned, and immediately responded by being absolutely shitty. Donald Trump, the man who literally tried to overthrow democracy, was also unbanned.
Elon’s argument are that these elitists were dominating conversation. But no one’s logging in to hear the political insights of FirstNameBunchaNumbers. As the best content creators leave, Elon will increasingly be left with a platform and an audience that looks a lot like Gab’s — and that’s a formula that’s already failed numerous times.
The Staff
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t expect layoffs after a major event like a purchase. You absolutely should. And many times, layoffs in these situations are necessary and/or warranted. Companies often have excessive baggage, and it’s reasonable to expect the purchasers to take a company in a new direction. But.
BUT.
Every person who has left in the last month is part of the puzzle that understands how Twitter operates. This isn’t just the coders. It’s the QA guys who know how to replicate bugs and the IT guys who know how to keep the servers up. It’s the moderation team that struggles to maintain a consistent moderation policy across the board. It’s the legal guys who keep Twitter from being sued when Elon does something dumb. It’s the international guys who know how to navigate laws across 200 countries.
Is there fat to trim here? Probably. Is it half the company? Almost certainly not. But perhaps most saliently, is one week enough time to figure out who is valuable and who is fat? ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT. But that’s how long Elon took to drop the first hammer. He’s still doing it. On Monday, he promised that Twitter was done with layoffs. Then he laid off more people Wednesday night.
Not only that, Elon has made it clear that Twitter will be a fucking terrible place to work. He will end the WFH policy that is now relatively standard in Silicon Valley. He will try to deny you compensation you’ve earned if he can weasel out of it. And he will crunch your team to do incredibly stupid features, and the push them into the world with insufficient QA or even any data that the userbase even wants them.
Everyone who went to Twitter because of the vision of Twitter is almost certainly gone. Everyone with talent probably had an offer in their mailbox before Elon showed up. Twitter currently has no central vision, and their new CEO is actively trying to destroy the old one that motivated the team.
Which brings us back to the IP. You know the code.
It’s a humongous pile of shit.
I mean, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard rumblings but, more to the point, it’s 16 years old. That’s 16 years of experimentation, desperate patches, failed experiments, and lord knows what else all piled on top of each other. I guaruntee its a festering slop pile of WTF.
That’s not unusual, of course. There are lots of billion dollar companies built on the back of festering slop piles of WTF. But here’s the key. The reason it works is the people. Twitter’s engineering staff is the only staff in the world capable of implementing anything in that code base quickly, safely, and with minimal service disruption.
Elon disintegrated it.
Elon wants to expand Twitter Blue to be an $8 checkmark anyone can buy. He laid off the Twitter Blue team. Elon wants to bring back Vine. He laid off the team that did that. Almost every idea that Elon has randomly thrown out as ideas who could rescue Twitter from the precarious financial position that Elon has put Twitter in was in some stage of development at Twitter already. And most of the people working on those features are gone.
And almost certainly much, much happier this Thanksgiving than the people who decided to stick around and work on this pathetic manchild’s incomprehensible and constantly shifting roadmap for the future.
The Reputation
LOL, well, that’s torched. As is Elon’s reputation as a wunderkind.
In Conclusion
Elon paid $44 billion dollars for Twitter – already 2-3x what experts thought Twitter was actually worth. For that money he got the codebase, the employees, the reputation, the customers, loyalty of the talent, the infrastructure and the advertising base. Every single one of these is in tatters compared to a month ago. And the reasons why can all be laid at the feet of the guy in charge.
Twitter is currently in a death spiral. Every decision that Elon has made so far has pushed Twitter farther away from being a viable business. And he’s trapped in it because he surrounds himself with sycophants and listens to right-wing nutjobs, none of which has even a meager understanding of the business. Can it break out? Probably not, until a more sober leader can come in.
Is it tragic? Yes. Is it funny? In a horrific sort of way, sure. But it’s all fun and games until you realize ol’ What’s His Face also applies this dazzling intellect, business savvy, respect for society, drive for quality and intellectual rigor to filling our streets with cars that drive themselves as well
Just my luck that all this would go down after I finally started expanding my feed beyond MtG card previews. Ah well. At least I’m in a sweet spot where I can appreciate what’s going on but not be terribly invested in what’s being destroyed.
And I got notice that you’re updating here again. That makes everything happening on the bird app feel even more familiar…