[HN Gopher] How Much Longer Can Twitter Last, Really?
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How Much Longer Can Twitter Last, Really?
Author : theery
Score : 30 points
Date : 2023-04-05 20:51 UTC (2 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (every.to)
| kosasbest wrote:
| Weird. I can't read this page _with_ or _without_ JavaScript. Can
| someone copy and paste the article here so people can read what
| it says?
| pitaj wrote:
| Yeah that's weird, for some reason they have
| html { opacity: 0; }
|
| Works fine with JS on though.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Twitter will last as long as Elon wants it to, the spend is
| pretty much know. And it's a software problem. Sure if they make
| zero money it's fail eventually but don't bet on that
| pomsense wrote:
| All these doomers don't realize the power of network effects.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
| exabrial wrote:
| Can someone succinctly and definitively explain why everyone
| wants Twitter to fail? It's a beat to death news headline at this
| point.
| cubefox wrote:
| Journalists dislike Musk, so they write articles biased against
| him, so most everyone dislikes Musk, including Twitter.
| s4n1ty wrote:
| [dead]
| akkartik wrote:
| How can anyone explain everyone?
|
| Succinctly: I want Twitter to fail because Elon Musk violates
| contracts.
|
| A little more: If he gets away with it, more companies will
| fire employees without paying severance. Toilet paper is also a
| perk worth preserving.
| adamrezich wrote:
| "I don't like Elon Musk and it frustrates me that he managed to
| purchase Twitter even though everyone in my bubble told me it
| wouldn't happen and/or that the process of doing so would
| bankrupt him, and neither of those things ended up happening"
|
| optionally, additionally: "also I liked Twitter better when
| only celebrities and friends of people who worked at Twitter
| could be Verified, because I was one of those friends, and I
| was Verified just like the celebrities, but the unwashed masses
| weren't, and that made me feel important and good about myself,
| and now that said unwashed masses can pay a nominal fee to
| become Verified, and Twitter is phasing out the older, unpaid
| Verified accounts, I'm going to take my ball and leave, because
| feeling more important than most people was a chief reason for
| me to use the platform to begin with. now come join me in
| moving over to $NEW_SOCIAL_FEED_APP and follow me there--where,
| you'll notice, my profile once again has an exclusive Verified
| badge of some sort, setting me apart from you, the unwashed
| masses."
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I don't like elon musk and I do think it is _bad_ that a rich
| person can buy an entire platform widely used for public
| discussion because they don 't like how it's being used.
|
| You're having fun mocking it but I don't think there's
| anything particularly inconsistent or outrageous about this
| position. Musk is annoying and hangs out with shitty annoying
| people, now shitty annoying people are more prevalent on
| twitter. The changes he's made to timeline, presentation,
| _letting the white nationalists back on_ make it actively
| worse for me, in ways it wasn 't before. None of these are
| preposterous preferences my man.
| adamrezich wrote:
| it seems to be working just fine despite all the layoffs.
|
| many of these complaints seem more political than practical. I
| understand that a set of people exists who are dissatisfied with
| twitter and/or are eagerly anticipating some grand implosion of
| the company, but many more people than this set use the platform,
| so questions like "how much longer can twitter last, really?"
| come across as having come from a very insulated ideological
| bubble, rather than taking the entire spectrum of experiences had
| by twitter users into account.
| [deleted]
| wootland wrote:
| There have been constant problems since Musk took over. Just
| yesterday retweets were showing up in people's feeds without
| the attribution of who retweeted them, so they looked like
| random people showing up in your feed.
| adamrezich wrote:
| it would be hard to argue that the scope of the issues
| directly correlates with the scale of the layoffs
| smeeth wrote:
| A meta comment: since Elon's takeover there has been an
| astounding volume of Twitter doom wishcasting.
|
| Almost none of these predictions have come true, and while I
| suppose they may eventually, the posts/articles getting
| increasingly difficult to pay attention to.
|
| Every time I see another of these my reaction is "god, another
| one?" I've been struggling to evaluate these articles on the
| merits, I'm sure I'm not alone.
|
| If you want to write an article like this and avoid this problem
| I recommend that you take extreme care to at least pretend Elon
| failing wouldn't give you profound schadenfreude.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Almost none of these predictions have come true
|
| There's only one prediction that really matters in my eyes: the
| prediction that Elon would win the October 2022 court case and
| somehow get out of his contractual agreement to buy Twitter.
|
| Can the future be predicted? Ehh, probably not. But the thing
| that has held up time-and-time again is legal, contractual
| obligations.
|
| 1. Elon Musk is terrible at understanding contracts.
|
| 2. Because of #1, Elon Musk breaks contracts on a regular
| basis.
|
| 3. In some cases, Elon Musk gets sued, it takes months (or even
| a year+) for the courts to address these contracts, and Elon
| eventually gets his ass kicked in court.
|
| #3 has the most uncertainty. But... Elon has been breaking
| contracts with such vigor this past year (including his
| attempts to "not buy Twitter", among others), that I'm willing
| to bet that he's going to make the same mistake again, and
| again, and again.
|
| ----------
|
| Haraldur Thorliefsson and the FTC case are both similar events
| to the October 2022 court case in my eyes. They seem to have
| solid foundation of law. They seem to have been ignored by Elon
| Musk, and finally, there seems to be court action going on.
|
| I don't know how long the court action will take, but I'm
| willing to bet against Elon Musk on this one.
| [deleted]
| smotched wrote:
| None of those are/were predictions...
| dragontamer wrote:
| Were you around here for the last year? That bots and mDAU
| numbers are so awful that Elon Musk would obviously win the
| court case? TWTR stock price was $35 or less (despite Elon
| Musk's court-ordered offer of $54 per share).
|
| Then, there was a prediction of "If forced, where would
| Elon Musk's money come from??". And I think everyone knows
| that Elon's #1 source of money is TSLA shares. Lo-and-
| behold, TSLA drops dramatically as Elon sells $10s of
| Billions to fund the Twitter deal.
|
| This was probably some of the easiest money you could have
| made last year in the stock market. Short TSLA in 2022
| (since Elon needs a source of funding) and long TWTR
| (because Elon would lose the court case).
|
| ----------
|
| Now we have other, court-based predictions going on in this
| blog post. I'm not sure if there's much to trade on (maybe
| short Tesla? If Musk has to tap into TSLA shares to pay for
| these issues??)
| edmundsauto wrote:
| To be fair to the doomers- slow failures can look like
| "business as usual" for a long long time. It's very dependent
| on how someone defines success and failure. If Elon pours a
| billion a year into Twitter, is that a failure? Alternatively,
| is it really a success if it just keeps chugging along but
| doesn't grow or innovate?
|
| Maybe Twitters ends up something like IBM. It's still _there_ ,
| but people can differ on whether IbM of the last 20+ years is
| really successful.
|
| Edit - this is why most "predictions" are dumb, they are not
| concrete, measurable, or time bounded.
| retox wrote:
| The average person doesn't care about any of this crying, they
| will use twitter for another ten years.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The average person probably _doesn 't use Twitter_.
| smotched wrote:
| I think its obvious he means twitter user
| smt88 wrote:
| Twitter needs to dramatically grow its user base to
| survive
| gary_0 wrote:
| Elon/Twitter stories get clicks in part because of the "how's
| he going to get out of this one!?" factor. As the article
| points out, Twitter's financial numbers and upcoming
| liabilities don't look good. This is not subjective; Twitter is
| in bad fiscal shape. In some ways Elon walked the same knife's
| edge with Tesla and SpaceX (he himself admits how touch-and-go
| it was at various points), but he managed to pull it off.
|
| Now he's doing a similar stunt with Twitter, but with a much
| bigger and more attentive audience. And a far cockier attitude.
|
| And everyone's wondering how long he can play corporate Evel
| Knievel before his luck runs out.
| adamrezich wrote:
| I thought it was quite well-understood that Musk has a long-
| term plan to turn Twitter into "the WeChat of the West", a
| centralized identity/payment platform, likely in the form of
| x.com?
| gary_0 wrote:
| Sure, and he also has long-term plans to build a Tesla
| autonomous android, and a SpaceX Mars colony. I wish him
| the best of luck, but I'm not going to put money on any of
| those plans succeeding any time soon.
| adamrezich wrote:
| of those three things, turning Twitter into WeChat seems
| by _far_ the most plausible, achievable, marketable,
| sustainable, and profitable--so, what point are you
| trying to make here?
| LiquidSky wrote:
| The way he's been running Twitter, at this point a Mars
| colony does seem more likely. It hasn't just been erratic
| but actively buffoonish. The "plan" seems to be whatever
| whim he has day-to-day, made infinitely worse by his
| seemingly 24/7 capering on Twitter himself.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| I highly doubt twitter will be the wechat of the west. I
| don't think any app would be that at least for america
| for cultural/political reasons
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Longer than these long winded hate blogs...
| jamestimmins wrote:
| An alternative is that it gets purchased for a few billion
| dollars by a tech PE firm or Microsoft, which honestly would be a
| pretty good outcome.
| paxys wrote:
| A low single digit billion exit is meaningless for Elon. It
| things reach that point it'll make more sense for him to just
| ride it out till the end and file for bankruptcy.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Even if you bought Twitter for $0, you're taking on $13 Billion
| in loans.
|
| You'd have to buy Twitter for *negative* dollars, like -$8
| Billion (ie: Elon gives $8 Billion to you and Twitter) to
| "only" buy the company for $5 Billion effective costs.
|
| Note: The $13 Billion loan is likely devalued 30%+, so maybe
| its only worth $9.5 Billion these days. Hard to say exactly,
| I'm just making some crude assumptions here. The loans may have
| been backed by several banks, but they aren't trading on the
| public market yet so its hard to value them.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > An alternative is that it gets purchased for a few billion
| dollars by a tech PE firm or Microsoft, which honestly would be
| a pretty good outcome.
|
| But with all the potential outstanding liability? Why not wait
| until the hammer comes down and the uncertainty is gone to
| purchase the firm, or whatever assets are useful, unless you
| _really_ want to beat someone else to the punch?
| dragontamer wrote:
| I know you know this, but I'm going to elaborate for others.
|
| Bankruptcy is the best time to buy companies. The loans will
| be rewritten, so you can buy the company's assets _WITHOUT_
| taking on any of its liabilities. The Twitter name,
| trademark, and other assets (maybe source code, servers,
| data-centers, etc. etc.) all will be up for sale. You can
| likely buy the "bits of Twitter" you care most about, and
| leave the other bits for others.
|
| I have severe doubts that anyone will want to buy Twitter
| when it has so much debt under its name. Might as well wait
| for it to collapse first.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Twitter is also under fairly severe consent decrees from
| both the U.S. and EU. I wonder how those would work if you
| bought e.g. the trademark?
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Option 3: Musk says something _particularly_ offensive and starts
| an avalanche before these hammers even fall.
| theery wrote:
| Likely the most likely
| dragontamer wrote:
| I don't think so. There's been a lot of especially stupid
| things said the last 4 years, and I haven't seen any real
| backlash to any of it.
|
| People like it when rich people say stupid things on the
| internet. Its how he grows his fanbase.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| I dunno. He may not lose his fanbase, but there is a line
| where many advertisers will leave, which will make the
| _remaining_ advertisers antsy and more prone to leave.
|
| And this is not unprecedented. See: Kanye West.
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