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Comment by thomasmiller_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious why these discussions sidestep the fact that a company has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. It is understandable, from a shareholder perspective, to not want your investment's brand next to potentially unsavory content. It seems that there is a real and unresolved tension between a culture of free speech (which I wholeheartedly endorse) and modern-day capitalism.

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I've heard this argument a few times and my response is that I don't think it's that simple in the case of Twitter. Abstractly I agree that the limit of a corporation's tolerance for unsavory content approaches the politically correct mean as time goes on. But I honestly feel that Twitter was nowhere near that mean and their moderation decisions were far to the left essentially excluding over 50% of the population. I don't believe that people pulling their ads are doing so because they think it's a good strategy or because they have issue with any content currently on Twitter. I honestly believe they've done so to their own detriment as part of the culture war that seems to surround Musk. In time the value of advertising will speak and the fears that Twitter will turn into a cesspool will prove unfounded and the fiduciary duty of the people who pulled their ads from Twitter to their own company shareholders will kick back in and they will return. If Twitter was say 40% agreeable under it's previous moderation team, I believe there's room for it to grow to 80% agreeable by tolerating more diversity of thought.

No need for weird conspiracies. An actual ad executive explained to Musk what problems he had. Musk proceeded to get pissy and block him, which I'm sure the rest of them didn't find very reassuring.

So far what I've been hearing is that the ad industry considered Twitter to be a bad place to advertise to start with.

Then Musk came in. First thing he does is to shout that there's too many bots on the platform, which I'm sure is just the thing one wants to hear when advertising.

Then he fired a lot of people, which seems means that Twitter is now hard to advertise on anyway, because internal systems don't perform well anymore and people used to talk to got laid off. And Musk is heaping in extra controversies on top.

Musk is simply incompetent at running this particular business.

You seem to be the one embroiled in conspiracies. Removing bots from the platform will make it more valuable and effective for advertisers in the long run. Firing deadweight will make it more lucrative in the long run. There’s a saying: “when you remove your hand from the bucket of water, the void will fill”.

No, I'm saying that one of the first things Musk did was saying "This has a lot more bots than I thought at first". He wanted to bail out over that. Advertisers of course saw that, and that didn't make Twitter any more attractive to them.

Yes, firing deadweight might help. Doing it immediately, before figuring out who's dead weight and who is not, that was the stupid part.

I think this is very good analysis with respect to Twitter. I suppose I'm really interested in how firms do their free speech vs. profitability cost-benefit analysis with respect to markets and environments where speech is restricted. For example (and I'll admit this is a glib argument) I am curious how Musk would reconcile his free speech absolutism with Tesla being active in China. Open to hearing thoughts on that.

Companies don’t have a duty to maximize shareholder value.

See here, for one discussion: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

From the same discussion: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

The first link in that article (that the law in Delaware is clear about corporate purpose) is to the author’s own writing elsewhere.

Not that it makes him wrong, but citing yourself is not a great look, IMO.

I appreciate the link.

Profit != value.

A publicly held corporation does have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, but managers often do things that they can argue might maximize shareholder value in opposition to what the shareholders believe. The managers almost always get their way, even when they turn out to have been wrong, or even when they never sincerely meant to maximize shareholder value. Sometimes shareholders rebel and sue. Sometimes the lawsuits work out in the shareholders' interests.

As to the specific matter here, Twitter is now a privately held corporation. It has no such fiduciary duty. The lenders can presumably call their loans if they think Musk will bankrupt the company. Musk can legitimately believe that his vision regarding free speech will maximize the company's value, and he could be right or wrong, or he could be making it all up as he goes and not be sincere about anything, and he gets to. I'm not a mind reader, so I won't hazard a guess as to what he thinks about freedom of speech and profitability.

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