It seems unlikely that we'll see any substantive action by the FTC.
The government has poured billions into SpaceX, Tesla, and Starlink, so apparently Musk can ignore Consent Decrees, undermine foreign policy, and endanger national security with no repercussions...other than the loss of ad revenue.
One observation: about 5 years ago I did some test advertising on Twitter, Bing, and Google, to see if it would bring more revenue. Twitter was by far the worst. I was selling a few English language professional books, for which at that time the main markets were Europe, the US, and Australia. All my Twitter cost for engagement went for 99% into clicks in Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc., so much that I even got the suspicion there were fake engagement farms there so that Twitter could create its own fake engagement and revenue (no, probably not, there will have been another dumb reason, Hanlon’s razor and all, but it felt as if there were — humans have a natural drive to conspiracy theories). Completely different from Google (which was the best for driving engagement at the time) and Bing, that actually got me some traction in my main markets. The advertisement experience at Twitter was: ‘bloody useless, feels almost fraudulent’. The aspect that Twitter might also simply be really bad at advertising compared with (monopolist) Google, might also play a role.
Elon is the prime example of the species ‘accidental billionaire’. He seems to have the crazy personality traits that can get some to rise to the top (e.g. a lack of empathy) and he was lucky. Zuckerberg seems to be another ‘accidental billionaire’ example. Once (with luck) risen to the top, they and the rest of us act as if they are truly brilliant. Because they are successful, we assume they must be right. This is part of our own psychology, where we (efficiently) look for patterns that ‘feel logical’. But Zuckerberg (Metaverse, anyone?) and Musk show that success is a risky indicator for being right. They were right in the past (but so did many others, probably), but that was not the main basis of their success.
Gates and Bezos seem genuinely smart operators (though Gates was right in being the first to understand computers would become cheap, and he was brilliant in (early Microsoft) business strategy (e.g. riding the dragon), his tech and ux credentials were dismal and he has been constantly wrong on many tech subjects in his career).
1. What makes you so angry? Never mind you disagree with me, why the angry tone? Why expressing that anger? Would you do the same if we we were sitting together somewhere and arguing our analysis?
2. I don't think I am the subject here, but let's set the record straight: I have no problem selling those books (they actually sold many more than I ever thought they would in my niche and near 5-star average review scores on Amazon and the reviews show they were useful to people — the same goes for my other public utterances). So if you want to vehemently disagree with my label 'accidental billionaire' fine, but stay with the subject, don't go 'ad hominem' in your argumentation (even if the subject itself is a human). It's ok to say I am clueless on the subject in your view. The rest of your qualifications are baseless, you know nothing of me.
3. I am free (and this is supported by research as far as I recall) to be convinced that luck is an important aspect of success in many cases. I recall "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" has been shown to be quite an oversimplification of the real world. Once Elon had his first big bag of money from selling a business which was a success, he was in a unique position. So he could branch out. Everything after is not — compared to other people — a level playing field, and so saying he is *thus* a brilliant business man is risky. Certainly, Elon has been successful and Space-X, Tesla, etc. prove at least that he saw the opportunities correctly, had a powerful drive (which is a quality indeed), and he obviously has made many right choices even if he was not alone making those choices, and there will be many unsung heroes (even to the point that they may have stopped him making big mistakes — we simply do not know). But the point is that others in his position would have made the same choices or maybe even better ones. The fact that he was successful and that he was in that position doesn't make him right on all subjects (from what I gather, he is generally somewhat simplistic on issues, which was ok when the internet boom happened, but now he has come in a situation where it's slowly not longer true that 'money makes right'). In fact, now he has gotten into a situation of real business with Twitter) and I would not label what he is doing 'brilliant'. I am wondering if and how long Twitter's monopoly on being 'western society's town square / free for all' will hold.
Yeah. I have no prediction of how long it takes, but Xitter is cooked and Elon's the one who poured gasoline on the charcoal and lit the match. I do wonder if his face saving ploy will involve some sort of "super app" move which offers a little banking and discounts on Cyber Trucks for super users or some such Tesla related garbage but doesn't really have a social media platform except for conversations between purchasers of other services. It would never get Twitter out from under the loans he put on them or otherwise make enough money to survive, but he'd sure show us. (Changing the entire purpose and model of the company might moot the FTC consent order, though-I don't know)
For better or worse, Elon did force all of Silicon Valley to assess, "do we have 75% too many people in this company". And at this stage, the fact Xitter runs with seemingly the same uptime but greater feature velocity with a much smaller team is a fairly significant trick to pull off. Whether that can persist, we all get to find out.
But will his partners let it die? Don’t they need a global disinfo platform for anti-freedoms/democracy speech? Threads is blocked in the EU last I looked.
I left in December (the time he locked journalists down over the ElonJet account BS) and I have added Twitter to my hosts files to redirect it to 0.0.0.0 so if I ever have a brain fart and click on a link to a tweet, it just failed to resolve.
I think Twitter had a tremendous amount of value that could be restored by transferring it to a normal owner. There are plenty of dumb ways to use it but I've found it to be a very effective channel, because I only write about one subject (Afghanistan) and the few people interested in it mostly belong to a group that uses Twitter obsessively (Afghans). I couldn't do that on any other platform.
I download my Twitter archive once a month or so, but having the old tweets won't be worth much if the site disappears and my audience scatters. I can see Musk being vindictive enough to shut it down just to screw the users and creditors even harder, but it would be nice if the courts disallowed that.
That's fair. I first joined Twitter circa 2009 as there was a burgeoning product management community growing there, and we used twitter effectively to share our experiences and grow professionally. Alas, in my case, the community didn't continue. As time went on, it became a series of content creators who were trying to leverage eyeballs and grow their personal brand rather than the betterment of the community.
And that is part of my bitterness to late stage twitter. It was so much more for a long time, but as it "grew up" as a service, its magic abated for me (and this is an opinion many of my earlier connections share as well)
Your use case seems important, and alas that would indeed be a loss.
---
I will add that as far as I can tell, Twitter doesn't have a sophisticated tracking network across the web for their ad targeting. To block Twitter required 2 lines in my hosts file. Facebook on the other hand, required about 1,200 lines of tracking and ad serving servers to prevent them from tracking me across the web. Twitter was always less evil than Facebook/Meta, and that is one reason why I stuck with them until last December.
It seems unlikely that we'll see any substantive action by the FTC.
The government has poured billions into SpaceX, Tesla, and Starlink, so apparently Musk can ignore Consent Decrees, undermine foreign policy, and endanger national security with no repercussions...other than the loss of ad revenue.
The schadenfreude, it burns.
Yep.
One observation: about 5 years ago I did some test advertising on Twitter, Bing, and Google, to see if it would bring more revenue. Twitter was by far the worst. I was selling a few English language professional books, for which at that time the main markets were Europe, the US, and Australia. All my Twitter cost for engagement went for 99% into clicks in Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc., so much that I even got the suspicion there were fake engagement farms there so that Twitter could create its own fake engagement and revenue (no, probably not, there will have been another dumb reason, Hanlon’s razor and all, but it felt as if there were — humans have a natural drive to conspiracy theories). Completely different from Google (which was the best for driving engagement at the time) and Bing, that actually got me some traction in my main markets. The advertisement experience at Twitter was: ‘bloody useless, feels almost fraudulent’. The aspect that Twitter might also simply be really bad at advertising compared with (monopolist) Google, might also play a role.
Elon is the prime example of the species ‘accidental billionaire’. He seems to have the crazy personality traits that can get some to rise to the top (e.g. a lack of empathy) and he was lucky. Zuckerberg seems to be another ‘accidental billionaire’ example. Once (with luck) risen to the top, they and the rest of us act as if they are truly brilliant. Because they are successful, we assume they must be right. This is part of our own psychology, where we (efficiently) look for patterns that ‘feel logical’. But Zuckerberg (Metaverse, anyone?) and Musk show that success is a risky indicator for being right. They were right in the past (but so did many others, probably), but that was not the main basis of their success.
Gates and Bezos seem genuinely smart operators (though Gates was right in being the first to understand computers would become cheap, and he was brilliant in (early Microsoft) business strategy (e.g. riding the dragon), his tech and ux credentials were dismal and he has been constantly wrong on many tech subjects in his career).
1. What makes you so angry? Never mind you disagree with me, why the angry tone? Why expressing that anger? Would you do the same if we we were sitting together somewhere and arguing our analysis?
2. I don't think I am the subject here, but let's set the record straight: I have no problem selling those books (they actually sold many more than I ever thought they would in my niche and near 5-star average review scores on Amazon and the reviews show they were useful to people — the same goes for my other public utterances). So if you want to vehemently disagree with my label 'accidental billionaire' fine, but stay with the subject, don't go 'ad hominem' in your argumentation (even if the subject itself is a human). It's ok to say I am clueless on the subject in your view. The rest of your qualifications are baseless, you know nothing of me.
3. I am free (and this is supported by research as far as I recall) to be convinced that luck is an important aspect of success in many cases. I recall "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" has been shown to be quite an oversimplification of the real world. Once Elon had his first big bag of money from selling a business which was a success, he was in a unique position. So he could branch out. Everything after is not — compared to other people — a level playing field, and so saying he is *thus* a brilliant business man is risky. Certainly, Elon has been successful and Space-X, Tesla, etc. prove at least that he saw the opportunities correctly, had a powerful drive (which is a quality indeed), and he obviously has made many right choices even if he was not alone making those choices, and there will be many unsung heroes (even to the point that they may have stopped him making big mistakes — we simply do not know). But the point is that others in his position would have made the same choices or maybe even better ones. The fact that he was successful and that he was in that position doesn't make him right on all subjects (from what I gather, he is generally somewhat simplistic on issues, which was ok when the internet boom happened, but now he has come in a situation where it's slowly not longer true that 'money makes right'). In fact, now he has gotten into a situation of real business with Twitter) and I would not label what he is doing 'brilliant'. I am wondering if and how long Twitter's monopoly on being 'western society's town square / free for all' will hold.
Using autism as an excuse for his public temper tantrums and bigotry, haha, that's rich.
That's it. You're blocked. Should've kept the schoolyard taunts to yourself.
Yeah. I have no prediction of how long it takes, but Xitter is cooked and Elon's the one who poured gasoline on the charcoal and lit the match. I do wonder if his face saving ploy will involve some sort of "super app" move which offers a little banking and discounts on Cyber Trucks for super users or some such Tesla related garbage but doesn't really have a social media platform except for conversations between purchasers of other services. It would never get Twitter out from under the loans he put on them or otherwise make enough money to survive, but he'd sure show us. (Changing the entire purpose and model of the company might moot the FTC consent order, though-I don't know)
Holy shit. How is that interview real?
Most CEOs are psychopathic narcissists, but most successful psychopaths know how to pose as decent people / manipulate people in order to profit.
It is said that the way to make a small fortune from owning a football club is to start off with a big fortune. Why am I reminded of that?
This story aged like a trillion bottles of warm milk
For better or worse, Elon did force all of Silicon Valley to assess, "do we have 75% too many people in this company". And at this stage, the fact Xitter runs with seemingly the same uptime but greater feature velocity with a much smaller team is a fairly significant trick to pull off. Whether that can persist, we all get to find out.
I can honestly say I do not envy him. Not even slightly.
But will his partners let it die? Don’t they need a global disinfo platform for anti-freedoms/democracy speech? Threads is blocked in the EU last I looked.
If Musk puts Twitter into bankruptcy I hope he won't shut down its existing accounts (including mine).
Wouldn't a bankruptcy court insist on salvaging as much value as possible, meaning he couldn't do that?
I just have to ask why you would care ;-)
I left in December (the time he locked journalists down over the ElonJet account BS) and I have added Twitter to my hosts files to redirect it to 0.0.0.0 so if I ever have a brain fart and click on a link to a tweet, it just failed to resolve.
I think Twitter had a tremendous amount of value that could be restored by transferring it to a normal owner. There are plenty of dumb ways to use it but I've found it to be a very effective channel, because I only write about one subject (Afghanistan) and the few people interested in it mostly belong to a group that uses Twitter obsessively (Afghans). I couldn't do that on any other platform.
I download my Twitter archive once a month or so, but having the old tweets won't be worth much if the site disappears and my audience scatters. I can see Musk being vindictive enough to shut it down just to screw the users and creditors even harder, but it would be nice if the courts disallowed that.
That's fair. I first joined Twitter circa 2009 as there was a burgeoning product management community growing there, and we used twitter effectively to share our experiences and grow professionally. Alas, in my case, the community didn't continue. As time went on, it became a series of content creators who were trying to leverage eyeballs and grow their personal brand rather than the betterment of the community.
And that is part of my bitterness to late stage twitter. It was so much more for a long time, but as it "grew up" as a service, its magic abated for me (and this is an opinion many of my earlier connections share as well)
Your use case seems important, and alas that would indeed be a loss.
---
I will add that as far as I can tell, Twitter doesn't have a sophisticated tracking network across the web for their ad targeting. To block Twitter required 2 lines in my hosts file. Facebook on the other hand, required about 1,200 lines of tracking and ad serving servers to prevent them from tracking me across the web. Twitter was always less evil than Facebook/Meta, and that is one reason why I stuck with them until last December.
Keep copying and pasting your rants, bozo. You won't get any of his imaginary genius on you by sucking his dick.
Wow. That's rock-solid.
One question, just out of curiousity: It has been over a year since then. Has Earth said anything to you in particular?