Thoughts on Elon Musk buying a stake in Twitter?

He also told Tesla and SpaceX to be back at the office. Not sure anybody there quit yet.

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I think thereā€™s a good chance that heā€™ll walk away in the end. Personally I wouldnā€™t miss it (and the other social media platforms). The First Amendment wasnā€™t drafted with social media in mind.

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A reminder that political discussion is limited to the politics forum. Several posts deleted.

Plenty have. Not places you want to stay at for more than a couple of years. What surprised me most was how many people laid off from Twitter had been there for a decade and/or celebrated their work culture (they even had a hashtag LoveWhereYouWork, or now LoveWhereYouWorked). Seems like it must have been a fairly cushy place, so not at all a typical Musk workplace.

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You mean like that time Musk replied that heā€™d donate 6B to help address world hunger if shown a public detailed plan? And then the UN World Food Program showed him a public detailed plan and Musk said nvm just kidding?

https://www.abc10.com/article/news/verify/business-verify/elon-musk-indicated-2021-to-donate-6-billion-to-fighting-solving-world-hunger-if-un-met-conditions/536-cad0e59e-775d-4c3d-a309-b3ef93379a71

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Iā€™m pretty sure thatā€™s from one of the hilarious EM parody accounts that have sprung up in the last week. I am also pretty sure thereā€™s too much self awareness in it to be actually him.

I was following along (the news reports, not the tweets) while it happened at the time. Thatā€™s just the first convenient link that popped up when I searched for it.

Itā€™s all out there if you care the search for yourself. I agree though it started out unusually seriously for him, as if he might actually follow through.

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I was not responding to that situation. Of course that is real!

I was responding to this one (you can see that if you check what post of yours I responded to):

Muskā€™s response:
ā€œItā€™s the activists forcing advertisers to leave Twitter! Itā€™s not because I fired the head of content moderation and blocked internal content-moderation tools! And definitely not because racist hate speech has exploded since I took over. And absolutely not because I tweet hateful conspiracy theories which blame victims of violent crimes.

Why does everybody hate free speech so much? Advertisers should be forced to pay for all these racist hateful violent tweets because free speech!ā€

That is a really good parody of him.

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Ooops sorry - the threading in this new forum format continues to confuse and baffle me :wink:

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No problem. I just donā€™t want anyone to think Iā€™m excusing him from anything!

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Why in heavenā€™s name would anyone have invested with Musk to fund the takeover of Twitter when the result AFTER NINE DAYS is this?:

I can accept ā€œcleaning houseā€, but this is something far deeper and stranger than that. And I guess Musk didnā€™t count on advertisers being so quick to ā€œpauseā€ advertising on Twitter.

Doing this stuff slowly over time, IMO, would have been a far more effective transition.

Anyway, it ainā€™t my money, but, like a lot of folks I know, I am taking steps to make sure that any Twitter accounts that I have are deactivated at the very soonest. I am also bending over backward not to click on Twitter links and also use an adblocker (which I donā€™t know affects Twitterā€™s revenue). Itā€™s the least I can do.

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Interesting, I donā€™t have Twitter account, donā€™t know how to get one, and donā€™t want to either. I can threaten to deactivate anything, it would be empty threat from me.

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How do you know that Musk did not tell his investors early on that he would take immediate personnel actions to cut staff by xx%? That would be a normal discussion when the bankers ask, ā€˜how are you gonna make enough cash flow to pay us backā€™? Ans, cut employees.

Personally, I think the reduction in advertising is being over-blown. Sure, GM cut their ads, but Elon is a big competitor of their future growth (EVs), so why would they spend money to enrich their biggest (currently) competitor? Pfizer also has a good reason to reduce Twitter ads, since Elon is/was not all-in on vaccines, a multi-billion business for Pfizer.

Ads across all social media are declining as the economy weakens. As you probably know, R&D and Marketing are the first things to get cut in a weakening business forecast.

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I have no idea what Musk is thinking, or if he is at all.

Check the comments in the article I posted abov from the Harvard professor who studies layoffs. It speaks for itself:

Sandra Sucher, a professor of management at Harvard University who has studied layoffs for more than a decade, said Twitterā€™s cuts were among the most poorly handled that she had seen. While the scale was not unprecedented, it was unusual to see layoffs done so quickly without a detailed explanation provided to workers about who was being laid off and why, she said.

ā€œThis is a master class in how not to do it,ā€ Ms. Sucher said. ā€œIf you were going to rank order ways to upset people, telling them youā€™re going to do it in advance, without rationale, that is a particularly inhumane way to treat them.ā€

Itā€™s more than GM. Itā€™s companies like Pfizer, General Mills, United, Mondelez etc. AFAIK, Musk doesnā€™t compete with those.

I have found some lists of the advertisers who have ā€œpausedā€ advertising on Twitter, but I believe it grows daily.

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Yes, I read the article yesterday, and was non-plussed. Of course, the prof is correct.

But then Iā€™m sure every business that Elon has built had an Academic at a top school saying, ā€˜thatā€™s not how you should do it.ā€™ Heā€™s a disruptor, and that means doing things completely different. Heā€™s become the worldā€™s richest man by following his own ideas, his own path.

Personally, I think buying Twitter was a bad deal. Just as I thought him buying Solar City was a bad deal. (Still donā€™t see the synergy.) But his money, his rules! (And the bankers who got onboard know that, adn they invested anyway.)

edited to add: I would be willing to bet that hundreds of B-School academics have commented that the previous management team of Twitter was doing it the right way (while losing billions). From the few tech folks that I know, Twitter was always considered the ultimate cush job. (read: overpaid and underworked)

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I remember he did say he was going to cut 75% before he bought the company,this news is not a surprised.

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Actually for SolarCity, heā€™s now selling the battery thing for Tesla owners, my brother installed one, pretty expensive, but my brother is all into EV.

The Powerwalls were originally developed by the auto company. The marketing fo them got shifted to the new Solar division after the ā€˜mergerā€™ took place.

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Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder, apologizes to the former employees for ā€˜growing the company too fastā€™, i.e., over hiring, resulting in required layoffs.

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Tesla (and SpaceX too) is considered to be just the opposite in the tech world. Hereā€™s an article on why Musk often sleeps on factory floor at Tesla: