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Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

> Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems.

I think, in this case, the colleagues were wrong. Twitter was sold because an idiot offered far more money than it was worth. If I have a coffee shop that earns me $100,000 in profit per year, and somebody offers to buy it from me for $10 million, I'm going to sell it to them even if I think the coffee shop is doing great and has the potential to grow.

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Both are probably true: Twitter leadership could not focus or execute, and the Board also wanted to close the deal. What’s likely missing from the employee perspective is that Twitter’s inherent non-focus actually attracted fresh content and contributors at some scale. Also that the company burn rate and debt was a threat at a very different scale.

Agree that the offering price and foolishness of the buyer was too good to pass up, but the particularities of Twitter leadership also helped set up an opportunity cost in the overall deal. Twitter never pursued ads as ruthlessly as Facebook.

Not to mention if you had effectively a legal obligation to your investors to do so.

Yes. If Twitter had attempted to remain independent, they probably could have, but the board members would have spent the next several years of their lives in depositions for the inevitable shareholder lawsuits. The offer was so rich, they didn’t really have much of a choice but to take it.

The company was virtually static for a decade. It was a long running joke that they weren't able to ship and the article does a good job of explaining why.

Might be true, I have no idea, but it seems irrelevant when discussing Twitter: they were a public company being offered a generous premium.

Twitter shipped a ton of features. It's just that most of them didn't catch on.

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