But hooooly crap does it underscore how much of a catastrophe Musk’s actions are.
I think that pretty much nails it. This is Zuckerberg's life - social media & nearby segments - and he's still in his prime (very active, attentive to threats / paranoid) as a competitor in the business sphere. If you give him an opening to cripple Twitter opportunistically, he's going to take a shot.
Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat (thus he didn't have to be overly concerned with his actions promptly sinking the ship)? It would be hilariously delusional if so.
It kind of did, just by network effects, but he’s spent the last 6+ months systematically filling it in. This last weekend might be the walls crumbling down
Now that that’s over it can’t meet the needs of services like my local power company pushing updates.
I don’t think he cared [0], because he’s always wanted to gut Twitter and remake it as a a very different service that is not really in the same market (very different substantive functions and revenue model.)
On the other hand he seems to have very not-evidence-based and turns-out-to-be-wrong-at-every-step map of how to get from a ad-supported microblogging platform to a user-pays long-form-content-and-financial-services platform.
[0] It did, through network effexts, but his plans were incompatible with focussing on preserving it.
Yes, first mover advantage. I don't think normal non-technically inclined people are going to move their twitter activities to "Threads".
Normal, non-technical users (including the key ones that produce a lot of content that other people come for) are often already on Instagram, and many are moving more of their presence their recently even without a Twitter-like UI in response to changes on Twitter. So, that’s something Meta can leverage to build Threads if they manage it well.
Of course it had a moat, wow.
since before the acquisition closed? i thought i heard somewhere they started working on this january-ish.
He bought it for ~40% more than it was valued and then scared away a lot of advertisers. That does not make financial sense, and is in large part the root of Twitter/his money problems.
Most estimates put it at ~25% of the value he paid 7 months ago.
All the debt you mention? He saddled them with that. That was t there until he came along. Another failure.
About the only positive financial thing you can say he did is cut payroll costs. Unfortunately he did that at the expense of site stability & reliability.
It will be studied in MBA programs as an example of what NOT to do
Income doesn't matter if you're not profitable.
>All the debt you mention? He saddled them with that.
No, Twitter was already in debt. The alternative was letting it die, which mind you I don't think would have been a bad idea, but if Musk's goal is to keep it alive then the huge amounts of debt would certainly do that.
>Unfortunately he did that at the expense of site stability & reliability.
The site did not have the efficiency or importance to warrant the number of employees it had.
He bought the company because he was mad they banned a hate speech account he thought was funny, unbanned them and brought all the other racists back to juice the numbers and so he could reply-guy them, and instantly lost all the advertisers because they don't want to be associated with statue avatar Nazis. That was not good business sense.
sure it's not like several banks have collapsed or anything...
>That was not good business sense.
I'm not in favor of letting nazis on platforms, but having your business decisions be beholden to advertisers is always a disaster in the making.
But on top of cutting costs, Musk has also made terrible product and communication decisions that killed significant amounts of revenue and audience.
