Elon Musk is a spoiled manchild who got in over his head with his accidental purchase of twitter.
Twitter is a hugely bloated company with an absolute shite of a website that renders too slowly to be acceptable on my 1Gbps fibre optic internet.
I believe both of these statements to be true. Thus I'm taking no sides here and I must say I took a dislike to both Musk and the person he just fired after reading a few of their public exchanges.
> On the one hand Twitter's CEO with relevant domain expertise making...
The CEO of Twitter seems to have very little relevant domain expertise though. He mixed up all the async services and the Android client making many requests, and then fired the people who pointed out that it was silly to do so... After Elon asked them...
Aside from that, Twitter isn't actually a tech company. It's sort of weird from an European perspective that you guys call companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook tech companies. Sure they rely on tech, they create a lot of the tech all of use, but at their core they are advertisement companies. Considering Elon Musk has managed to drive basically all his customers away in a couple of weeks, or at least earn the "High Risk" mark, seems to suggest to me that he has absolutely no domain expertise in the field of advertisement.
Before all this nonsense Twitter had around half a million verified accounts. If all those accounts agreed to pay $8 a month, that would be $48 million a year. Twitter had a 4.5 billion advertisement revenue in 2021.
I'm personally a huge fan of the downfall of centralised social media. I really, really hope federated services like Mastodon take over. In my view, the world would be a much better place if organisations like the New York Times, the European Parliament and so on, operated their own "Twitter" servers and then had everything link up through the Fediverse to give users the "Twitter" experience, because it would put the ownership of the internet back in the hands of important institutions and organisations rather than American advertisement companies, and if Elon helps the world get there, then that's awesome.
Even if it's not what he wanted. But then that's sort of the thing with Elon isn't it?
I'm fairly certain that the EU wouldn't be on a path to ban the sale of new fossil fuel cars by 2030 without Tesla and Elons vision. Unfortunately for Elon, almost none of the EVs sold around here these days are Teslas. Great vision, shit delivery. You can say the same about PayPal, which I'm sure is still big in the English speaking world, but is basically non-existent compared to Apple or Google pay everywhere else.
This is also why I wish Elon would get some help. Because the visions have made the world better, and if he could just focus on actually seeing those visions through, then he might actually get to colonise mars.
What is a tech company? That part is a weird take. There's a huge amount of infrastructure work that goes in to companies like Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc. They make their own servers, networking equipment, develop robust scaling storage solutions, ...
I suppose twitter, in comparison with Google, MSFT, AMZN... seems less like a company that sells technology, and more a company that uses technology to sell a social experience.
Whether that alters the definition of tech company is another matter
Twitter Android app dev fired: Guess it's official now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33603418
(66 points, 113 comments)