Just staggers me that Elon could have just… not done any of this. And yet here we are. He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
Is Musk making mistakes in his management of Twitter? I'm sure he is.
On the other hand, it is also true that a lot of people now have it in for him, and will amplify any story about such a mistake, regardless of how real it is, simply because it is what they want to hear, it feeds the current narrative, it makes great clickbait.
In terms of how Twitter actually turns out, I think we are really going to have to give it time, including waiting until the media gets bored with it and moves on to some other topic. It is probably going to do worse than Musk hopes, but also not as badly as many of his detractors predict.
Of course, Musk isn't helping things by feeding that media outrage cycle himself. But I can only imagine that behind the scenes, cooler heads – such as Gwynne Shotwell and Robyn Denholm – are urging him to step away from the controversy for a bit, stop feeding it and let it die down. Hurry up and find a new CEO for Twitter, then go spend a few weeks chilling on a tropical island.
> He’s had to sell billions in Tesla stock to finance this ongoing mayhem, this is surely going to be up there as one of the greatest examples of hubris in modern business.
He's always been willing to stake it all on the left field idea. Sometimes that has worked really well for him (Tesla, SpaceX), other times it has gone rather poorly (Twitter). But, you can't really have one without the other – either you take big risks, sometimes strike it lucky and make it big, other times get badly burnt; or else you don't, and you avoid the burns, but you'll never make it as big either. The kind of person who always takes the right big risks and never the wrong ones, is either too lucky or too wise to actually exist.
He made a huge amount of money really fast, and now he's gone back a lot on that. But he's likely got another 20-40 years of life ahead of him, he could easily make it all back and then some.
Yes and no. The acquisition is now complete, so we can judge what led up to that. And it was terribly done. The dude made an offer on a lark, thought he could wiggle out, and discovered that, however much he normally can get away with shenanigans, a Delaware chancery judge was not among the people who would let him slide. So he was forced to buy a business he had spent months trashing publicly. He easily lost $20 billion the moment the deal closed. It's one of the most spectacular own-goals in business history.
We can also start judging the actual takeover. There is absolutely no reasonable business goal that justifies the level of chaos and mismanagement during the takeover. Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done. If someone had wanted to maximize the level of media attention, they could have hardly done better than all the dramatics.
So is it possible that he'll pull Twitter out of a dive and turn it into a functioning business again? Yes. Network-effects businesses are notoriously hard to kill, which is why Twitter survived all these years despite its problems. But it it likely he'll ever turn a profit on it? I doubt it.
But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while, with a lot of people buying his Tony Stark/Edison 2.0 routine. But those days are over. Tech reporters can be pretty credulous, as they are paid to get eyeballs. But business reporters are much less forgiving, as they're paid to be useful to people trying to make money. And now that Musk has made himself look so erratic, there will always be questions about his competence. His media honeymoon is over, and given how much he used his brand to hawk products and get cheap capital, that's going to be a big problem for him going forward.
I remember a few weeks ago Twitter wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on. That’s obviously not the case. Interesting how fast the narratives are moving.
Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1 and the machine wasnt fully activated to take him down (now that we have confirmation of what we already knew, that media companies collude to suppress or amplify coverage)… he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff. That’s astounding to me. All else equal, this business would have been significantly more profitable over night.
The fact of the matter is, companies will go where the users are. Once the noise dies down, why wouldn’t you continue spending money on Twitter if your competition is?