“I ran off all my revenue streams for a guy who won’t post” is admittedly a howling scream https://t.co/Svuvkcq95y
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) November 21, 2022
From the guy who coined the perfect ‘Apartheid Princeling Bitchboy’ epithet:
maybe the most fundamental sign musk has the business intuition of a doorknob is his belief donald trump is gonna give him anything for free
can absolutely see this spiraling into some wacky pay to play deal where trump gets $50K a tweet just to ultimately cost twitter $100K in back end revenue each time
what, ah, what leverage would you say you have in this here arrangement you’ve constructed, elon
so listen, donald it’s like this, I want to make you the star of this here show and it pays in exposure wait where are you going stop laughing I’m serious
I mean you are a motherfucking billionaire who bought a failing website with absolutely no prospects of making money and you think donald fucking trump isn’t gonna shove a spit down your throat and roast you over a cheery holiday fire for every penny he can get out of you
buddy… you fucked up again
(Not that a noncompete contract would actually stop TFG, but it does give him an out)
He’s a moron because he didn’t know that trump signed a non compete contract 😂😂😂 how does he not know this 😂
— Jenns burner acct (@jenns_acct) November 21, 2022
If you would like some insight into why advertisers are pausing their Twitter ad campaigns here it is: the UI is not working properly and they don't even know who to complain to about it because their support teams have vanished. https://t.co/bQ6w4wZCXl
— Eva (@evacide) November 21, 2022
who knows if this will actually translate to any business decision, but apple yanking them would be another extinction level event to contend with https://t.co/uOwk79MogK
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) November 21, 2022
ironing out a few bugs such as “the core concept is totally unfeasible with what it’s supposed do if you think about it, at all” https://t.co/TJV7KcuKNQ
— William B. Fuckley (@opinonhaver) November 22, 2022
I would simply get 4 billion people to sign up for twitter. https://t.co/zZQQb0tbNs
— Millard Fillmore's porcelain zither (@agraybee) November 22, 2022
A historic tech renaissance to do what, exactly? People love talking about Musk like he's an exceptional visionary, but his first month owning Twitter reads as someone who has no idea what he wants to do or where he wants to go https://t.co/nWgJvmZZon
— chatham harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison) November 20, 2022
But, sadly, seriously:
Twitter is incredibly important to the revolution in Iran. And incredibly important for countless reasons. Fuck that guy if he manages to break it. https://t.co/4X5ZlKWktE
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) November 22, 2022
War for Ukraine Day 271: Just a Brief Update On the Day of Dignity and Freedom
Lacuna Synecdoche
Elon Musk (?) via Anne Laurie @ Top:
Okay, Elon, I’ll bite: How many moderates tweeted out the n-word the day you took over?
Asshole.
Ruckus
The last couple of months has been a comedy of $44 billion errors that seems like it will never end.
I mean come on, first he bids twice the asking price for a website that is losing money, fires over half the staff, watches another 40+% quit and walk out the door flipping him off, all the advertisers walk away, the main reason he bought it was to reinstate an absolute fucking asshole, who just flipped him off, and now likely better than 90% of his non paying customers have walked away – leaving him zero draw for any advertisers that might be considering signing up. This is a businessman? The worlds wealthiest dumbfuck is more like it.
Ken_L
I have to admit that color-coded check marks are the kind of ingenious, outside-the-square innovations that only the world’s richest man could think of.
JWR
He couldn’t get TFG, (yet), so Elon went with the next worse thing.
frosty
AL, I feel so sorry for you, if Twitter fails! And for all of us, it’s been a great (second hand*) resource.
*She reads twitter so I don’t have to LOL
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Oh, Twitter’s gonna make history, all right, in much the same way that the Titanic, the Hindenburg, and the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge made history.
JoyceH
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: I was thinking something more like the WKRP Turkey Drop.
sukabi
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: 10 bucks says that tweet was written by Musk using a fake account….or one of his hostage hb1’s accounts.
frosty
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: @JoyceH: Both are excellent observations. But neither has the staying power of a MBA case study of corporate failure. Or one by the Harvard Business Review. This could last awhile!
Bonus! Case studies in psychology classes!
Argiope
@JoyceH: “As God is my witness….” Nice seasonal reference!
Martin
Two thoughts:
I mean, my point with 2) is that Twitter is dead. We don’t know in which way precisely it’s dead, just that its in this weird liminal space right now where its death is clearly apparent, but we don’t quite know the form it will take. In fact, more potential forms of death may yet materialize.
Martin
@frosty: I’ve argued there’s no case study here because none of the lessons are transferrable to any other situation that a business student might find themselves in. And case studies generally focus on the things done right – like the Tylenol poisoning crisis management effort, etc.
Plus the whole affair runs counter to a b-school core belief – that wealth is a measure of competence.
NaijaGal
Thanks to Major Major Major Major for getting me to sign up for a Mastodon account in early 2021. Although the Fediverse isn’t exactly a Twitter replacement, I’m really enjoying my interactions there. However, an army of volunteers isn’t going to be up to the task if an instance gets big enough to attract a significant number of people with ill intent. Then there’s the cost issue – since servers are run by volunteers, enough people need to donate to maintain and upgrade servers, etc.
I don’t want Twitter to fail because I see the power it has for good in upsetting the status quo in many countries (including Nigeria and the #EndSARS movement) and shining a spotlight on problematic governments by bringing daring citizen journalism directly to the masses (see Iran, the Arab Spring demonstrations, etc.).
On a more selfish note as a debut author, most publishers want authors to use social media, including Twitter, for promoting their books and to aid discovery. This is an issue for new authors like me who have no previous books and are not celebrities (basically authors with no name recognition).
It’s clear to me that Twitter is at a crossroads and its new CEO’s intentions are murky at best. Beyond the US, there are many governments that would be happy to see Twitter die and would pay handsomely to make it go away. I saw the Saudi investment in Twitter very differently from most US takes I’ve read but I hope I’m wrong. I’m not optimistic about Twitter’s future but I will stay on there until I can’t anymore.
Ruckus
@Martin:
I’m not sure it’s actually dead yet.
It is on oxygen, the intravenous feeding is contaminated with rat poison, the doctor has gone home and a local gang is trying to figure out how to cut the incoming electrical supply without killing themselves, the janitor is studying Fortran to see if he can fix the problem with the lights going on and off, I’m pretty sure that gasping you hear is it’s labored – almost breathing and as soon as Elon can figure out how to zip up his pants without harming himself we may see a comeback.
I’m not holding my breath.
Ruckus
@Martin:
Is it possible that someone may decide to use this as a what to never ever even think of doing as a business person, owner, investor, executive, cleaning crew, lender, pedestrian on the sidewalk out side the building, game inventor, comic book author, insane asylum inmate, actual human?
Calouste
@Martin:
Note the last sentence of what that ad manager said about the current state of Twitter for advertisers: “These things cost us real money.”
I’ve worked in adtech, and from what that guy says, Twitter as an advertising platform is pushing up the daisies.
Martin
@Ruckus:
Ruckus
@Calouste:
If you were an advertiser who was looking for a place to advertise your product would you spend a dime on twitter now or in the next 100 yrs if your produce was any thing whatsoever besides how to destroy $44 billion?
Calouste
@Calouste: One thing that is really fucked up about the advertising is that 6 year old creatives are active again. A creative is a graphic or animation or clip etc. that’s the actual content of the ad. Of course as an advertiser you’re not interested in seeing that stuff from six years ago, specially for that advertiser, as it was probably referring to conferences that held six years ago and stuff like that. So those creatives get flagged as paused or expired or inactive, and there’s no normal business reason why they should be reactivated en masse. Heck, I think the place I worked didn’t even have a process for it except do a manual update in the database. So how the fuck Twitter suddenly reactivated all that, I don’t know. Things are actually worse “eventually Twitter will fall over because it’s barely maintained “. They’re actually actively breaking stuff that was functioning before.
Ruckus
@Martin:
My tongue was extremely in cheek when I typed that…..
So much so that it’s taken me 10 minutes to get it back into it’s normal resting place.
Ruckus
@Calouste:
“They” are not actively breaking it. It took several thousand people to keep it running and they are gone, fired or quit. The people left are likely not even close to the head technical people.
As Martin said, it is dead. It’s just not buried yet. All things considered I’m sort of amazed that it still opens at all.
Martin
@Ruckus: But that’s not a lesson you learn in B-school. It’s a lesson you learn in middle school.
This is so wildly, comically bad that there’s kind of no lesson in it. “Don’t buy an advertising revenue dominated business when you know nothing about advertising and don’t want to rely on advertising” isn’t a useful lesson unless your students all have $44B.
I mean, if Musk had attended business school and taken even a single marketing course and internalized almost anything from that class, he wouldn’t have bought Twitter. You don’t need this as a case study because it doesn’t add to the curriculum. I mean, I’ve helped write a few business school lectures around this kind of stuff and it’s always focused on the subtle shit, the nuance that you might not have deduced from the other parts of the curriculum. ‘Don’t fire ¾ of your employees when you don’t actually know what they do’ isn’t a nuanced lesson. ‘Make sure you don’t destroy every means for your advertisers to run ads and give you money’ also isn’t nuanced.
There could be a lesson in the difficulties of operating a two-sided market (which is legitimately difficult) but again this is two cartoonishly stupid to convey that message. Uber is probably a better case study of how to have enough drivers signed up so that rides are available quickly but not too many that they can’t make money, and how Uber has tried to use surge pricing to address shortcomings there. That’s a subtle lesson.
There should already be a case study from Twitter regarding the role of moderation as a tool to remove chaotic elements from a community and how that relates to advertising and brand safety, as well as maintaining or growing the user base. But Musk rolled into that scene like President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho and blew it the fuck up.
Martin
@Calouste: I mean, they could fix all the technical issues at Twitter and put the moderation in place, but you still have an owner/CEO that personally replies to Libs of TikTok (you know, the group that targeted Club Q) and spreads conspiracy theories about the Speaker of the House. The decision to allow Trump back but disallow Alex Jones is purely a personal decision by Musk. It’s impossible to operate in an environment where no rules can apply because the owner/CEO will not be bound by any rules.
The only hope for advertisers to return is if Musk is no longer associated with Twitter.
I’m guessing he simply doesn’t give a shit because he believes he can pivot to direct pay – paywall the whole place. Ok. Yeah. Good luck. Twitter as some aspirational public square cannot be if you have to pay to access. There’s probably a market for that, but it’s not 400 million users. Substack is about 1.5 million. That’s a lot more realistic.
Ruckus
@Martin:
I’m not sure you are understanding me. I thought the tongue in cheek bit would have clued you in.
I agree with you. I just think that standing in the middle of the street burning $44 billion, thousands of jobs, and any respect anyone might have given for shit for brains 2, is so over the top that the only possible answer is to make fun of it. As you say this is not business school crap this is middle school crap.
I’ve owned 2 businesses, one failed because of an earthquake, which ended up with me getting hit by a truck head on and I wasn’t in a car, you might have heard of it, Northridge, and the other because of another in a seemingly endless parade of rethuglican recessions. I have a history of shit hitting the fan and I’m still here and according to my docs, doing fine and normal. And currently watching the worlds richest man make a complete ass of himself in front of the entire world. I think it’s hilarious. OK not actually hilarious but then this world doesn’t always have funny on it’s daily list of things to do today and we can still laugh at a moron publicly proving that he is.
moops
How long can the wealthy owners carry Twitter without real advertising revenue? It has new debt to service, and servers to power and networking to pay for and some staff will be required to keep the thing turned on.
moops
Mastadon is going to need advertisers and a real, paid, professional staff, and proper servers and network bandwidth.
Perhaps they can ask for $8 donations to bridge the gap while those things get set in place? There are a lot of former Twitter employees looking for a new job.
Martin
@moops: Rich assholes have been pouring money into conservative causes forever. Twitter might just become the 4th shitty subsidized conservative network after Gab, Parler, and Truth.
Sebastian
@Martin:
Thank you for your insights tonight, Martin. Very accurate and succinct.
And lol
I’ll quote that
mrmoshpotato
Says the blood diamond bitch who sold verification for 8 bucks a pop.
Martin
@moops: Mastadon doesn’t actually need that. It’s a feature of the platform. Each instance can fund itself however it wants. Some are ad driven. Some are patreon supported. Most are just cheap enough to run that nobody gives a shit. I looked at setting up an instance and it’d be about $3/mo for 100 users. If I built a community I wanted around that I’d be happy to eat the $3.
There are a lot of things that Mastodon does need though. They need some instances that can replicate the utility of Twitters verification. An instance where only credentialed journalists (the media can figure out what that means) can have accounts, that kind of thing. They can fund that themselves. And that is now happening. Mastodon requires a fair amount of internal self-organization, and that organization also handles and determines how moderation will work. Moderation on the journalist instance would probably look very different than on one that caters to furries. And that’s okay. It would be trivial for NAB or some entity to fund the journalist instance.
They need developers to move the codebase forward. That’s pretty rag-tag right now. They also need developers to build better clients. But those are all things likely to happen if the platform continues to scale.
But you can envision instances being run and supported by a professional society, or an association, etc. This is going pretty rough right now because Twitters fall has been so rapid that these things haven’t really had adequate time to play out.
mrmoshpotato
Sounds like this guy did his own colonoscopy – by shoving his head all the way up his ass.
matt
Based on his behavior, I think its clear Musk was really mad about how Twitter treated him and spent $44 billion to abuse its staff. Amazing self own.
matt
@mrmoshpotato: There are a lot of people in the VC/consultant world who are doing this kind of posting. They have wanted to treat tech workers the way Musk is treating these workers for decades now, but couldn’t.
The Thin Black Duke
@matt: Bottom line, Muskrat’s Twitter game was always lame. Twitter’s value was providing an equitable playing field, and he couldn’t compete. Anonymous “nobodies” who didn’t give a fuck how rich Elmo was regularly curb stomped him with ease.
Expletive Deleted
The cynical conflation by ravenous capitalists of “small business owners who work day an night to make a go of it” and “at-will employees forced to work unpaid overtime for a billionaire’s profit”.
Gvg
@Martin: well wealth is not a measure of competence and a good business professor wants to teach good thinking over bad. They are well aware of this faulty assumption, at least mine were, so this will be a good gruesome and attention getting case to maybe get through to more students hard noggins. At least for awhile before people forget how puffed up opinion has been about Elon Mr. Tesla.
Shalimar
@matt: I think Musk was trying to buy shares secretly and then manipulate the stock price with his phony interest and sell his stake at a profit to create cash wealth since 95%+ of his net worth was in stock and options, but he fucked up and made a legally-binding offer that he spent months trying to back way from and couldn’t. His aides finally convinced him in early October that he was going to lose so he might as well go all-in, run Twitter full-time, and have a good time for his money.
Geminid
That’s one observation in a piece analysing midterm voting patterns, by Sam Brownstein for CNN. This morning’s Politico Playbook links to it.
Looking towards 2024, Brownstein says this trend could mean that the Presidential election will turn on just 4 remaining swing states with 43 Electoral votes between them: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.
Baud
@Geminid:
Hard to see the GOP nominee winning the popular vote under that scenario. Yet again.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Calouste: did I get that right from his post, that Twitter was randomly turning old advertisements back on and trying to charge his company for it
Baud
Amir, if you’re here, did you feel the earthquake in Indonesia?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It’s been mention that Elmo Musk doesn’t believe in advertising and refuses to do it with any of his other companies.
Frank Wilhoit
@mrmoshpotato: It is not a coincidence that pretty nearly everyone left at Twitter is “colored”, in the South African sense of the word, which is very different from American English usage and which has a deep history and a set of connotations that we are not familiar with.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@The Thin Black Duke: yes, another way to put it is Musk turned Twitter into some MORG and then wrecked his precious game with his rich brat pay to win.
Walker
The problem with Mastodon is that strong social media platforms need capable legal teams. Between copyright issues and autocratic regimes trying to get at users. I just don’t see it right now.
Geminid
@Geminid:
@Baud: I wonder if North Carolina might be an additional swing state for 2024. It’s been hovering on the reddish side of purple for a while now, and its demographic trends resemble those of Virginia to the north and Georgia to the south.
zhena gogolia
Apologies if this has already been stated, but TFG had a staff writing those fucking tweets for him. He probably doesn’t have that now, and he has no idea how to do it.
different-church-lady
@Martin:
“We have a rabid goat running our company. What do the case studies say about this?”
different-church-lady
@Ruckus: You’re right, it’s not dead. It’s undead — a zombie.
RSA
Interesting, the reasons who advertisers may leave Twitter.
This part is dickish, leaving out the possibility that an advertising company might make a moral decision, not driven by ideology or just for show. Maybe the writer thinks that’s the nature of advertising, though.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Unfortunately, it is his place in legal terms. He can destroy is for kicks or through sheer stupidity. Yet another sign we need confiscatory taxes for the rich
BellyCat
@Ruckus: Upvoted for clarity.
zzyzx
@moops: That’s Zzyzx’s law of social media: it is impossible with our current technology to have a social medium that both scales enough to be interesting and is cheap enough to be funded ethically.
Mastodon is trying something interesting by going “What if instead of one server, 100,000 smaller ones,” but I think it’ll run into the same problem.
For me, it feels like newsgroups and I feel like I’d need to have multiple accounts under different servers to do what I do on Twitter. I’m going to miss that place.
MisterDancer
Hadn’t thought of the situation that way, but that’s disturbing to consider.
(I have a LITTLE awareness due to White South African anti-apartheid roommates in college.)
zzyzx
@Martin:
As did I for a second and then I read this and went not worth it:
https://denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.html
Matt McIrvin
@RSA: I interpreted that as saying more that many advertisers would be driven off even if they weren’t inclined to make some kind of moral stand, not that nobody would. The phrasing is cynical, though.
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: I’ve seen Twitter’s current state compared to Wile E. Coyote running out past the edge of a cliff and standing on thin air before he looks down.
kalakal
@Frank Wilhoit:
When I came to the US about 10 years ago it took me a while to get used to the American English usage. The Anti-Apartheid movement was a big thing in the UK in the 80s and initially I was shocked by the American usage, I still have to a rapid mental double check sometime.
BruceFromOhio
You’re making tech history all right, Simon, perhaps a little different than you’ve imagined.
BruceFromOhio
@zzyzx: That is excellent material. While not sold on the Mastodon model, setting up an LLC with independent assets is wise. Clear policy and then active administration and policing of content is absolutely the way to go, if that’s too much work then use another platform.
Another Scott
@Shalimar: +1
He was hoping to play GameStop stonk games with it and do pump and dump and get free praise for his genius. And force Jack to let the RWNJs free.
The best thing about the whole exercise is watching him lose in every aspect of his little manipulative schemes.
Cheers,
Scott.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: he probably felt the use of “between” rather than “among” in post 38!
Sam Brownstein should know better….
Another Scott
@zzyzx: Thanks for the pointer. It would be good if she adds a tl;dr to the top though!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Matt McIrvin: The comparison that keeps coming to my mind is the Titanic after it’s hit the iceberg but before the decks start tilting, and the discussion between the owner and the builder, in which the owner wants to know when the ship can resume its journey to New York, while the builder bluntly states that the only place the ship is going now is the bottom of the ocean.
Steve in the ATL
@Steve in the ATL: just saw the news story and regret sounding flippant….
Ken
Ah, now there’s a thought. We could call it “My Boss is an Insane Billionaire”. Board game, or RPG?
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
@Matt McIrvin: Alternatively, to a chicken sans head yet still moving about.
And no, I’m not talking about Mike.
Tony G
@Ruckus: Elon is so grotesquely wealthy (for some reason) that if he loses all of the $44 billion he will still be grotesquely wealthy. So, it’s all a game for him. Monopoly money.
different-church-lady
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Except Elon thinks the ship can now go to Mars.
Calouste
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I didn’t get that from the post. What was reported is that old creatives (the actual ad content) were enabled again in the planning tool, which is annoying and time wasting when you’re working with it, but it doesn’t directly cost you money. He did also say however that they had issues saving changes to campaigns (which tell the system when to show the creative, who the target audience is, how much money you have to spend etc), and that of course directly costs the advertiser money. You’d only see old campaigns again if both the end date and the maximum allowed money to spend would change, and Twitter doing that without advertiser involvement would be rather criminal.
J R in WV
@Ruckus:
This was a great hysterical sentence, thanks for writing it!