Merged Musk buys Twitter!/ Elon Musk puts Twitter deal on hold....

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Trebuchet said:
To give him his due, he DID try to back out of the deal after he realized he screwed up. But since he couldn't, and can't admit he screwed up, he's all in.


He's not stupid. He's sometimes extremely foolish, but not stupid. Brilliant, in fact. And like many brilliant people, weirdly foolish.
Musk has essentially single-handedly transformed space flight. His company has done more orbital launches than any single nation this year. He's taking people into space, where my former employer Boeing has failed over and over. His other company has made electric cars something to be aspired to, instead of just a joke. Every other car-maker is trying to emulate his.
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That was then; this is now.
I think his ego has taken over and made him stupid,frankly.
I notice that people in aviation tend to be the Musk fanboys.
 
Olmstead said:
Musk is an idiot. Twitter users aren't actually their customers, advertisers are. Twitter users are their product, and now he's made the product all sticky and misshapen and promises to make it even stickier and more misshapen in the future.
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This looks to be genuine.

https://muskmessages.com/d/34.html
Elon's iMessages
The messages are taken from public records and filings from Elon Musk's upcoming court case with Twitter. They were interpreted by AI. We've aimed to be as accurate as possible, but we can't guarantee accuracy or validity. Some documents were redacted, so our AI got confused and made mistakes. Don't take these as fact without your own proof.
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I checked with a few of them and they were.

Basically what you said.

And I remember a teacher, probably when I was about middle school age (I can't remember whether it was primary or secondary school but years 5-9) explaining to the class how free newspapers made their money.

None of us struggled with it once the concept had been pointed out.
 
Myriad said:
Okay, thanks. I can see there's some value in that. That kind of participation obviously takes a lot of work, but for hobbies there's no contradiction between costing money and requiring effort.

Automated suggestions along the lines of "based on your current feeds, here are some others you might like" would add more value, if only such algorithms weren't so crappy ("if you like Lord of the Rings you might also like Game of Thrones"*) and so tempting for the platform owners to monetize by bumping "sponsored" suggestions.

The attention of other users is limited-sum (not zero-sum, but it increases only by increasing the overall usage of the platform) so "pay for more attention" is an inherently limited commodity. And as others have pointed out, letting deep pockets pay to push their content at everyone just turns the user experience into an ad fest. You can take money from m&ms to disseminate their posts more widely, but you can't also get users to pay for access to those posts if that's not what they want to see.

I can see why the company might look to other areas like games or banking to add value and increase revenue. Those raise other questions though.


*The problem with them is, by nature they're based primarily on popularity, and so end up in a "you like popular things, here are some other popular things you might also like" attractor, when what would really help is "here are some unpopular things you, unlike most people, will probably like." Overall popularity is the DC component of the signal that should be filtered out.
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Twitter tries to make suggestions based on the folks I follow. I ignore them. Usually I follow someone based on another user's recommendation. For example, Stephen King will suggest a few novels that he's recently enjoyed, and list the authors Twitter handles. If I like the books, I follow the authors. Same thing with ex-intelligence people I follow who suggest accounts, and or news stories.

There's an element of control as to who I follow. I can't control what others share, which is frustrating because Twitter thrives on outrage to generate view-times and clicks. This is where they make their money through advertising.
 
Reading those messages there may be an element of truth: the previous board missed opportunities to monetize the platform.

As time went on, and other apps/sites sprung up enabling creators to earn, Twitter's options were becoming pretty limited.

In particular: membership $50 a year - no chance. Maybe, just maybe, if it had been brought in at the beginning, and for a nominal sum.
 
commandlinegamer said:
Reading those messages there may be an element of truth: the previous board missed opportunities to monetize the platform.

As time went on, and other apps/sites sprung up enabling creators to earn, Twitter's options were becoming pretty limited.

In particular: membership $50 a year - no chance. Maybe, just maybe, if it had been brought in at the beginning, and for a nominal sum.
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Could have made sense, but as mentioned, a fee would almost certainly make a massive reduction in numbers of people who sign up, which would reduce the audience for advertisers.

Musk is now trying to square the circle at a time when people are pretty much accustomed to being on social media for free.

And, as has also already come up, unlike with Tesla which built an audience that agrees with his vision, here he has inherited an audience that is most well known for squabbling and being perpetually negative about everything. It would take the world’s biggest ego to think you could just turn up and have Twitter accept you.

There are of course some sycophants who laugh at anything he says (“look he’s holding a sink”) but that is probably only a tiny fraction of users. It may still be many thousands so it seems to him he is always massively popular. But that’s where his ego has probably led him astray.
 
angrysoba said:
There are of course some sycophants who laugh at anything he says (“look he’s holding a sink”) but that is probably only a tiny fraction of users. It may still be many thousands so it seems to him he is always massively popular. But that’s where his ego has probably led him astray.
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Small aside - I think that it might be better to treat the sink bit as "I'm going to sink this place" by now.
 
Aridas said:
Small aside - I think that it might be better to treat the sink bit as "I'm going to sink this place" by now.
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I just took it as an indicator that this man thinks it's amusing and acceptable to joke about the livelihoods of his employees.
 
While all the chuckles over this are well deserved, let us not forget that a lot of small businesses and content creators have long used Twitter to connect to their customers/audience.

If Musk throws a child tantrum tomorrow and pulls the plug or the whole thing collapses because he fired everyone that knows how to run, big businesses and major stars will have other outlets, the little guys not so much.
 
JoeMorgue said:
While all the chuckles over this are well deserved, let us not forget that a lot of small businesses and content creators have long used Twitter to connect to their customers/audience.

If Musk throws a child tantrum tomorrow and pulls the plug or the whole thing collapses because he fired everyone that knows how to run, big businesses and major stars will have other outlets, the little guys not so much.
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Like there's no other viable way to connect to your customers and audience...

How did we ever get along without the internet and twitter?
 
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Yeah, I never did get the sink thing. Never thought about it, never even wondered because I never even gave it a second's thought or attention, until reading the mention of it here, but I never did get it, and don't now.

So what WAS it, that sink? Why on earth? Has Musk explained, does anyone know exactly what the message was, what the joke, what the point was he was trying to make?
 
Skeptical Greg said:
Like there's no other viable way to connect to your customers and audience...

How did we ever get along without the internet and twitter?
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That's all very well, but if you're in business and competing with other businesses - it's not the same.


The Roman army was very effective in the first Century AD. Maybe we should issue our troops with Roman equipment?
 
Chanakya said:
Yeah, I never did get the sink thing. Never thought about it, never even wondered because I never even gave it a second's thought or attention, until reading the mention of it here, but I never did get it, and don't now.

So what WAS it, that sink? Why on earth? Has Musk explained, does anyone know exactly what the message was, what the joke, what the point was he was trying to make?
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It was a bad joke. To explain the joke a little - "Let the fact that I'm the boss now sink in." Ha. Ha. Ha.

To be a bit fair, I do like double use wordplay humor. His execution was eye-rolling, though.
 
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Chanakya said:
Yeah, I never did get the sink thing. Never thought about it, never even wondered because I never even gave it a second's thought or attention, until reading the mention of it here, but I never did get it, and don't now.

So what WAS it, that sink? Why on earth? Has Musk explained, does anyone know exactly what the message was, what the joke, what the point was he was trying to make?
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Aridas said:
It was a bad joke. "Let that sink in." Ha. Ha. Ha.

To be a bit fair, I do like double use wordplay humor. His execution was eye-rolling, though.
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Yeah, for some reason people always used to post “hidden” pictures under Musk’e tweets warning that the image contains nudity etc…. But when clicked, so I have heard, it would reveal a bad dad joke pun such as a picture of a sink outside a door “let that sink in” or a well in a briefcase “well in that case” or on a musical note “well on that note”. Surprised he hasn’t used the latter while making other decisions such as the price of blue ticks or firing half his stafff, etc….
 
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