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0 pointshotpotamus3y ago0 comments

Well, that was a bit of a joke, but I have been around the block a few times and been on one side of a merger or other, and gone public to private and back (as an IC/soldier, never been management). The Twitter acquisition is the craziest thing I've ever seen; there's a reason it's big news.

These kinds of things have formal courtship type periods and legal filings that take months, and then they happen, and then executives plan on rolling out layoffs and cost cutting measures over years, not days or weeks, like the "plan" seems to be here. This really is madness, and I can't blame people for thinking the site might just wobble and collapse at some point, though as the author goes into in very nice detail, we do try and build resilient systems. I'm certainly curious how it all plays out, but you won't catch me making any guesses.

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emodendroket3y ago

This kind of schedule and chaos looks more familiar for acquisitions of a small company I think. I guess it is strange for it to happen to a company of Twitter's size, but I think the big-news aspect of it has more to do with how much journalists use Twitter.

lelanthran3y ago

> I guess it is strange for it to happen to a company of Twitter's size, but I think the big-news aspect of it has more to do with how much journalists use Twitter.

I think you hit on the the main point: the reason this is constantly in the mainstream media is because the mainstream media so heavily relied on/still relies on twitter[1].

If this were any other large company imploding in a Musk acquisition we'd see fewer stories about it because it affects journalists less.

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[1] It's going to be especially funny if journalists complain that "#LearnToCode" type of tweeters aren't getting banned, and get told in response to go off and create their own twitter.

No matter where in the political spectrum one may lie, it's always satisfying to see a group being fed their own lines back.

hotpotamusOP3y ago

> This kind of schedule and chaos looks more familiar for acquisitions of a small company

That's certainly possible and I wouldn't know what that would look like, and yep, in theory there are lots of financial rules and regulations regarding public companies that Musk made a bit of a hash of.

I can't agree that Twitter's journalist demographic was mostly responsible for this being big news, though I'm sure that plays a part. Musk brings the circus with him wherever he goes, but this was nuts even for him. And any $44 billion tech buyout would be news without those factors.

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