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Comment by ChicagoDave | Hacker News Reader

I doubt Musk has the patience for building or owning a graph based technology business. The complexities of Twitter’s architecture are not trivial and a huge reason it’s not been successfully disrupted.

The other big reason is balancing the greater good vs unrestricted access, which has taken years to accommodate.

Musk is just an ego-centric billionaire with a lot of money and an unproven belief that Twitter could be better with his proposed changes. I’d bet he’s thoroughly aware that those changes could destroy the platform.

I believe the offer is rejected and the other top ten shareholders (all hedge funds) buy up anything he dumps and the price remains stable.

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Twitter is complex. But not nearly as complex a building a mass produced EV, charging and servicing infrastructure and space company. You have a bug in twitter? Easy try something new. Bug in either of the others? People DIE. Twitter will barely be remembered next to MY___________ in a few years. It's blank for a reason.

Apples to oranges. The fanboyism is not helpful.

OK but SpaceX and Tesla and are all significant software shops in their own right.

Tesla and SpaceX are as complex as it gets, orders of magnitude beyond Twitter.

Paul Graham on building a new Twitter: "A decent team could reverse engineer a version 1 in a month."

This is laughable. Social graphs are not trivial. It may not be as complex as landing a rocket booster on a platform, but it’s definitely as complex as monitoring a car.

Twitter had 100M MAU after 3 years and it was still operated entirely by just 300 people. So it’s not that hard. Musk could easily recruit 300 engineers and cost will be peanuts to him. Additionally, early growth of Twitter was driven by various celebrities signing up and bringing their audience to the platform. Here Musk has unique advantage as he has huge celeb network which can be convinced to move over or at least cross post. He can count on enabling slew of features like edit button, more chars, easily verified accounts etc to lure many users. Musk can hang in for years and easily eat up the cost. Earlier competitions did not had these advantages.

I'd argue Twitter is just as complex, because Twitter's product is its users and the content they create, where the others are governed by the laws of physics and making a good car (i have one, they're good!). What you have is a bunch of engineers on twitter going "ah yes, its just a social network feed! I wrote that in CS244 as my class project. how hard could it be", forgetting that twitter is an international network with tens of thousands of hyper targeted communities that feed off each other, diplomats that negotiate with governments and communities, etc. Not to say that this is impossible for anyone else to make, but it's a lot harder than just launching a site with your hundred engineers. i'd recommend reading platformer.news for a good

It’s not been successfully disrupted because a disrupter came and went viral, and AWS literally deleted their servers as they were becoming the most downloaded app

Are you talking about Parler and the overt fascism and racist postings?

No global corporation will allow that in their midst. You’re a fool if you think there is any long term viability to those psychotic beliefs.

It will tank the price because other people will sell if he does. I don't know if his threat is strictly illegal, but the feds have to reign in some of this behavior sooner or later or all of the Musk day-trader fanboys will think they too can get away with it. A few people can't, but the SEC can't deal with thousands of Musk's fanboys skirting the law.

How is it skirting the law to trade based on what he publicly says?

88% of Twitter is owned by institutional investors. They will instantly protect the stock price.

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