Comment by hraedon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hraedon | Hacker News Reader

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I think we have already waited long enough with Twitter to conclude that the emperor, in this case, has no clothes.

Twitter isn't like SpaceX or Tesla: there aren't enormous government contracts, subsidies, or climate credits to prop up its finances. There is no plausible replacement for the advertising revenue his style of leadership is actively alienating, and there is a real risk that his strategy is exposing Twitter to enormous FTC sanctions given that they are already under a consent decree.

It is much more likely that he's deeply in over his head and floundering than it is that he has a master plan he can only execute by taking a blowtorch to Twitter's current business structure. How much worse does it have to get before that theory is validated?

It's been a week or two, hasn't it? How is that possibly long enough to arrive at a judgement. Twitter under Elon is just getting started and there are no quantifiable results yet. Reaching a conclusion now, before there is any real data, is unreasonable.

Suppose shedding 4k employees saves about a billion dollars a year, and the increased attention and activity brings in more users, and the increased users attract more advertisers? If Twitter Blue reaches 10 million subscribers there is another billion in revenue - and maybe more if you can more profitably sell ads targeted to people who pay for Twitter.

Again, I am not saying the above is what I think will happen. I genuinely have no idea. I'm saying the above seems at least like a plausible path that is still open to Twitter becoming stable and/or profitable. It's also possible that the chaos and losing so many employees will cause Twitter to break apart and crash - but we haven't seen that yet. Or that the place will become so toxic advertisers will refuse to advertise there and it will never be able to make money and die. Or many other negative possibilities.

It is simply premature to be writing the death certificate for a patient who is still alive and screaming.

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