It's interesting to see how popular this saga is, with punch by punch updates in the main tech communities.
Now, losses may be piling up - but Twitter was always unprofitable. Burning money at a higher rate - and even finding new ways to lose it (impending fines due to no moderation seem imminent from the EU) - still doesn't appear fundamentally different. The workforce cuts have decreased operations expenses by a large amount - although we don't know how much.
I'll be happy to see an analysis of this in a few years - but so much speculation is tiring.
> Now, losses may be piling up - but Twitter was always unprofitable. Burning money at a higher rate - and even finding new ways to lose it (impending fines due to no moderation seem imminent from the EU) - still doesn't appear fundamentally different.
So you think it's not fundamentally different that Twitter was losing 100-200 million USD a year, and it's now projected to lose 2-3 billion USD a year.
> The workforce cuts have decreased operations expenses by a large amount - although we don't know how much.
About 1.7 billion by calculations I saw.
However Twitter's operating costs are to the tune of 5 billion.
Just the interest rate on Elon's loan (which is now Twitter's loan) is 1 billion a year.
We just passed 1 month since acquisition, and yet the multitude of articles(and 1000's of posts here on HN) calling out Twitter for not paying it's debts makes it seem like they are > 30/60/90 in arrears. I understand it's a shit show, but pouring gas on the fire is not helping; the exact opposite, as I presume it is intended.
Frankly Elon mostly caused this upon himself. The media love a hero, and he was the darling genius hero that'll save humanity for over a decade now. I hope you understand how this image the media helped build for him has direct effect on him being able to attract investors, their capital, forge deals with governments, get subsidies, attract quality employees, and ultimately make a ton of sales to end users.
Media gave Elon a lot, and all Elon had to do is keep his inner asshole... inner. We all knew the reports from whistleblowers about questionable behavior and safety in his factories. We know he's been fired twice from his first two ventures. We know a lot. And we ignored it. Because we wanted to believe in the genius hero visionary.
But it's hard to ignore when he's making an ass of himself 24/7 out in the open, on Twitter, and in front of the world.
He attracted all this attention, he wanted it. He entered with a "sink" remember? He wanted the media to cover this. And then he proceeded to act like a lunatic. Firing people, rehiring them, firing them again. Launching a feature that caused mass impersonations, removing it. Trying to launch it again. Delaying 3 times. Picking up an UNHINGED battle with Apple over a "secret tax" that was the highlight of a public keynote by Steve Jobs in 2008.
And see when the media has glorified someone SO MUCH, and he's completely betraying that image and embarrassing the media... the media feels responsible to reciprocate by basically "wait a second, we always said we love Elon, but we don't support this... or that... oh my god he did what? we totally don't support this". They have to do this. Because the default over the years is they support what Elon does by default. And he made it impossible for them to support him.
Now, losses may be piling up - but Twitter was always unprofitable. Burning money at a higher rate - and even finding new ways to lose it (impending fines due to no moderation seem imminent from the EU) - still doesn't appear fundamentally different. The workforce cuts have decreased operations expenses by a large amount - although we don't know how much.
I'll be happy to see an analysis of this in a few years - but so much speculation is tiring.