Elon completely miss the point in this exchange, which is that Twitter needs people like Stephen King far more than people like Stephen King need Twitter. Why should Stephen King care about how Twitter pays it's bills?
The entire point of the blue check is that Twitter has an impersonation problem, what happens when some fraction of users find it worth paying $8 to impersonate a celebrity?
In other words, it is that it's going to be very difficult for users to intuitively understand what "half ads" means and why they should pay for it.
It's a completely nonsensical compromise. Musk's product ideas for Twitter seems to assume that what everyone wants is for Twitter to be more complex, with more knobs to fiddle with.
There's a simple way to make this legible to the user: instead of slashing ad frequency, eliminate half of ad surface. I.e. if there are N places on the page where ads are being served, turn off half of them for the paying users. This will be an obvious difference, and remain so even as the ad intensity/frequency increases.
but there aren't N places on the page where ads are shown, there's one place: in the feed, at an unspecified frequency as you scroll. twitter doesn't have any ad surfaces to eliminate.
Half of ads is strictly more valuable than all of them. Whether or not it's worth $8 is another question, but people still forget it's all a supplier-driven market: there is, and is not going to be, an option to pay $8 and get no ads. You choose out of what's being made available.
> But if it's only 10% less annoying, there's very little incentive to buy.
Right. But that $8 doesn't only buy you halving the ad load, but also all the other things like better reach and the "I'm a paying user, I'm better than you non-paying ones" checkmark. I mean, if it works on GitHub...
> And adblock is an option sitting in the wings.
Yes, but! Most people use Twitter through the app, and blocking ads there isn't as simple as having your tech-savvy friend install uBlock Origin in your browser. Adblocking in apps is, even for techies, something between extremely sophisticated and downright impossible.
They are certainly different domains, but can you justify the claim "Self driving has a well defined, static problem space"?
One of the things that makes safety critical applications like self driving so hard is they have such an abundance of low probability, high severity cases that it is very difficult to define/test them all.
I think it's static inasmuch as it isn't an inherently adversarial problem. The world isn't bent on thwarting self-driving cars. Bot authors are bent on subverting detection.
What I mean to convey by "well defined" is that even though the problem space of self driving cars is enormous, the success criteria of teaching a car to self drive is probably going to look pretty similar in 10 years to what it looks like now.
Bots on the other hand changes constantly - what is the definition of an abusive bot? What is the definition of spam? The adversaries on Twitter adapt not only their tactics but also their goals.
We've gotten quite a few public comments from Musk on what he plans to do with Twitter, and they indicate total cluelessness from a product and engineering point of view. There's nothing to indicate an appreciation for the unique challenges Twitter has in balancing free expression with appeal for advertisers (or even that these needs might be in conflict), or even on the subtleties in what free speech even means for Twitter. The acquisition seems motivated by politics and impulsiveness rather than any coherent vision for the product.
A rocketing share heals a lot of wounds. His abusive management practices might fly at Tesla, or his vision oriented startups. There's ample room for doubt his tactics will get results on a turnaround job like Twitter.
I'm curious as to how existing Twitter employees get compensated after the sale. Do they have to stay for some amount of time to collect payouts on their shares?
These actions only make logical sense if the goal is to make life unpleasant for employees, and get a lot of them to quit.
Anyone holding stock just got a massive bump above the market value(3-4x?) after Elon overpaid for it. If an employee already sold all their RSUs, well, they probably got nothing.
I also own a Tesla and I'd rate their user facing software at a C+ at best. It's better than the competition, sure, but the competition is legacy auto manufacturers with no tradition of expertise in software.
Examples: the mobile app is very clunky and slow, the in-car dashboard devotes half of it's real estate to a visualization of the car's object detection, serving no purpose other than to distract the driver.
It's fine. But the problem domain of Twitter is dramatically different than anything Tesla engineers are working on.
A chicken and egg problem of data acquisition. If I'm a user, why would I share data to such a service without concrete services to unlock? If I'm a service provider, why would I pay for a service without users?
Really such data is obtained only by service providers, credit bureaus being an edge case. And if I've built a service that acquires such data, why would I sell it rather than build more services to sell?
Three different flavors of big bet. Meta realizing their core business, while massive, has peaked, loudly reorienting their business around a dubious moonshot bet.
Google burning cash in a moonshot division, dubiously betting that creating startups within Google is easier than outside of it.
Uber/Lyft subsidizing customers for a long while to take over the market, which... pretty much worked? Of the three "big bets" this seems most promising. Even if the market decreases, it's not going away, nor is it going back to regional taxi companies.
Its worth considering that 3 is actually quite common within large companies as well. I can think of a few industries dominated by big tech that have never turned a profit or even positive free cash flow.
The thing that actually puzzles me is that in the post-Kalanick era, Uber didn't more aggressively pivot to essentially being a taxi company where drivers supply their own vehicles. You've got a working app--how many people do you need to maintain/enhance it? Self-driving isn't happening in an economically interesting time horizon--certainly not reliable door-to-door in cities. So raise prices, cut costs, and have what's a fairly attractive taxi business for many places.
Of course, that may not have been what investors wanted to hear.
Consider also a couples therapist, all the same rationale applies.
In either case, read up on the process for finding one that works you (and maybe your partner). Make sure it's someone you respect. There's a wide variety in quality, and if it's someone who you do not take seriously it will not be a good use of time.
I'm a bit older (35) and what I've come to view about my earlier relationships is that I didn't invest much in them. Didn't share my feelings, didn't make myself vulnerable. At the time I thought I just wasn't meeting the right person, now I feel there were probably a dozen women I went out with that could have been terrific partners.
This is not to criticize embracing being single at 25. It's a good opportunity to figure out who you are and what you like. But the empty "a way to not be alone" relationships also happens in short term relationships and casual dating. You get what you put in.
> I haven't found ultimate happiness
You will not find this, it does not exist, and it is certainly not obtained by catching some mythical "the one." Unreasonable expectations will doom any relationship.
The entire point of the blue check is that Twitter has an impersonation problem, what happens when some fraction of users find it worth paying $8 to impersonate a celebrity?