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Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

Also Elon showed with twitter that the company was indeed big and so many people were not required.

Is this sarcasm? Twitter has been less stable and has been making more dumb choices since Elon took over, and they've lost at least half of their revenue so far. They've lost literal billions.

I don’t think that’s fair. Twitter was already operating at a loss and wasn’t going to win at performance advertising. A change in business strategy to something like payments seems reasonable for the long term.

Lets call it what it is without any bias.

Twitter lost advertising because its a bad outlook, not because of technical issues.

Twitter still works. Sure, it has issues, but still works. It definitely was a bloated company, and if Elon could keep his autism under reigns, he could have came out with reducing the company, keeping the same advertising income, and being more cash positive.

> if Elon could keep his autism under reigns, he could have came out with reducing the company, keeping the same advertising income, and being more cash positive

That's all your imagination - we can make and support any claim that way. The actual facts we have point the other way.

Let's stop making Musk look like a victim. Nobody blames autism when Tesla's sales increase.

Don't let your hate boner for Musk replace your brain. Nothing in your post addresses what I said. I never mentioned Musk is a victim.

It is very possible, in fact likely, that gutting a ton of people directly involved in ad-related work - sales, press management, content monitoring, etc - had a negative impact on advertising revenue.

Yes, but that doesn't preclude the fact that Twitter had 7500 employees prior to layoffs, without anything really to show for it. He could have still trimmed a lot, while keeping the relevant people in place.

> Yes, but that doesn't preclude the fact that Twitter had 7500 employees prior to layoffs, without anything really to show for it.

Well, they had 3x or 4x more income and market value than Twitter with fewer employees. That's quite a lot to show for it.

And all of that wasnt due to extra engineers and personnel, it was due to the audience on the core product that had no real new features.

Losing half the revenue has little to do with the headcount required to run twitter as a tech product.

A massive social campaign was ran to make twitter seem like a hateful place which advertisers should stay away from.

If that hasn't happened, for the most part twitter runs just as well as it did prior.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-s...

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2022/12/19/c...

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-donald-trump...

What am I supposed to infer from your links other than the exact targeted media smear campaign that I mentioned in my own post?

Is it really a "targeted smear campaign" if they're reporting facts of twitter allowing more far right wing extremism?

Hasn't revenue dropped by something like 50%? It's reputation is in tatters - it's an example of what not to do. Hasn't Musk lost a ton of money on it?

It's too early to say whether this is an example of what not to do.

Elon hasn't realized any losses yet, while on paper the company may be worth less that game isn't over for him.

He hasn't done himself many favors by stirring up controversy with his own statements, but it isn't surprising that revenue for an ad-based business takes a hit when the brand is raked through the coals by a large enough group of people making noise. That could be one step towards it failing, or it could be one of many dips while the company is not rebranding itself and changing their business model.

Through speculation we can create any outcome, but if we stick to reality and evidence, it's a clusterf-.

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