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Comment by hsn915 | Hacker News Reader

Stock prices fluctuate. It's dumb to measure a company's success by a temporary change in stock price.

You should be measuring actual things. For Tesla, this means car sales and operational costs. For Twitter, it's still too early to see if Elon can make it profitable.

Now, for sure, some moves were really dumb mistakes, like suspending people for advertising their Mastodon profiles.

But remember, Musk said early that in the coming months Twitter will do a lot of stupid things. He knew ahead of time that he's screw up on some decisions. This should be familiar to anyone who remotely has any interest in the startup/entrepreneurship world. Try many things, correct the mistakes, double down on the good things.

If you see any highly skilled programmer doing live programming, they will do some obvious mistakes on stream. If you conclude from this that they are stupid, it's only because you have no idea how programming is done.

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Move fast and break things and all that jazz is fine and something I subscribe to myself to some extent. But preventing people from linking to other social networks or several of the other "initiatives" Twitter has taken these last few days do not appear to me to be new features being tested, but the whims of Elon, being carried out in realtime.

I used to have a great deal of respect for the man and that has not completely vanished. I think that he has created real results that he deserves credit for. But his actions these last few weeks do not look like those of a strategic, forward thinking leader but rather like impulsive reactions to a self-inflicted chaos.

> You should be measuring actual things.

From the article:

> Twitter, which lost $221m in 2021, is now on track to lose $4bn a year, by one estimate.

This is pure bullshit.

"By one estimate".

I could also claim: Twitter is now on track to become massively profitable, by one estimate.

Can you dispute it? Is it not an absolute fact that by some estimate Twitter will be massively profitable?

Depends on who's estimating doesn't it?

This is why legacy media is not trust worthy.

How can such obvious bullshit fly right over your head?

Musk says Twitter "has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May". That's an actual quote[1].

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604626103326253056

Yes and it seems he's very concerned about Twitter's profitability. It's probably why he tried to ban links to sites he saw as competitors.

This is very different from the take in this and similar articles.

Twitter might have a lot of problems, and it's probably made several mistakes. Musks's firing of half the employees and reinstating accounts banned for political reasons are not of them.

I agree with measuring.

That is at least a good outcome of all of this. That it becomes more and more visible for normal users, that news have just become entertainment. And with having news in aggregated/dense form for everyone, one can see also the mechanism, how things get distributed and re-used in channels.

For me a big eye opener was something, that happened a long time ago, when i was working for a company, that became news itself, and i was doing the exact work, that accidentally became news. What i was reading then was just made up fluff and had no overlap with my own experienced reality.

And i think many have the same experience, that when they read articles, that one has expertise of, that it is mostly wrong and sloppy, while, when we read articles about other topics, i just tolerate it and hope and pray, that it is correctly reported. :-)

Please reflect on whether you're being unreasonable and too emotional on this response (i.e. you're not considering the evidence that is given and you're not giving evidence of your own).

This is why you're getting downvoted. You can come up with a reason why we're downvoting you, but maybe it's because you need to reflect a bit more on what you're saying and be more open with different opinions/facts?

The poster above you gave you a quote of an estimate. This can be challenged if you quote another estimate or you find some deep methodological flaws on the estimate. Your argument, as it stands, is nonsensical

This is wishful thinking. The business is fundamentally broken beyond repair at this point.

They lost the majority of their only meaningful income source.

They managed to scare off a large number of their most valuable content creators.

They lost their most important staff.

They have picked up a lot of unwanted attention from regulators across multiple markets.

They have already stopped paying their bills on fundamental things like rent.

It’s over. It’s just a matter of timeline that’s up for debate.

You're judging way too early.

Advertisers will come back in a few months as long as Twitter stays alive and activity lever rises.

There are other revenue sources being planned (Twitter Blue is not the only one).

Now, obviously, it might fail, but it's too early to tell. Too many people want it to fail, that's for sure, but many people want it to succeed.

The doomsayers said Twitter will go offline because so many staff were fired. That didn't happen. In fact there are signs that the opposite is happening.

This line you keep telling yourself about it being too early to tell is because you don’t seem to have any kind of business or advertising background.

It is obvious and has been for weeks now to those who do.

I assure you these are going to be unrecoverable failures for as long as Elon is at the wheel.

At best he will be able to sell it for a tiny fraction of what he paid. At worst he might take down Tesla with him considering he just alienated his entire target market of people who were actually likely to buy an electric vehicle in the next 5 years.

(Context: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tesla-buyers-are-bailing-because-o...)

I agree that you can only judge success ex post facto. We’d all be millionaires if we correctly called shots and could bet perfectly on stocks, for example.

I think you highlight the problem in the middle of your blurb though:

> Now, for sure, some moves were really dumb mistakes, like suspending people for advertising their Mastodon profile

The “dumb mistakes” are happening at a vastly increased rate these days. The fact that you say you will do stupid things before doing them does not justify them and a drastic uptick in the rate they are made is concerning.

So while I’ll admit that there is a chance that most people are wrong and this situation will turn itself around, I’ve yet to see a sign that gives confidence in the new direction of the company.

SpaceX's first three launches failed miserably. The company was very close to shutting down had the forth launch not miraculously succeeded.

With Tesla Musk also made a number of decisions that almost killed the company. The difference is, the mistakes he made were primarily manufacturing mistakes that could be reversed (it was just a matter of not running out of time and money).

With Twitter there is no undo. When 80% of advertisers leave because of erratic governance they're just gone. You can get new advertisers to replace the old customers, but that takes a long time. There is no going back to Twitter before Elon. There is no vertically integrated first principles engineering approach to fixing Twitter, because on a fundamental level the interest of the advertisers, users, regulators and journalists are at odds. You can't make them all happy, and as Elon has just discovered, it is very easy to upset groups that are vital to the health of the platform.

Twitter could make a comeback.. they'd need to sellout to Google or Microsoft probably, and he'd probably get AT MOST 5 billion.

These companies know how to run online communities like GitHub, and YouTube. They're also more professional and less prone to one person's cult of personality.

There are other options like Chinese, various Middle-Eastern countries, maybe Russia.

I would think that those guys would love to pay couple billion for such platform and to verify there is no disagreeable material in there either in tweets or private messages.

The problem being, social aggregations are essentially regulated by convention, meaning, by a network of trust, which in turn requires a minimum of stability. The lesson to be learned from this adventure is really about stability and how social aggregations and their wider sphere (i.e., advertisers) react, when you pull this stability without providing sufficient reasons for this. Mind that this wasn't a fresh start-up, but an already established community (or, to be precise, a bundle of communities with diverging interests and backgrounds that somehow had grown to tolerate each other to a certain extent as long as they sticked to some unwritten conventions.)

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