so current elon - Twitter situation is like this:

EM - i will buy this company for 44B

Twitter: what!? 44B for this crap? our ESOPs will make us millionaires! sure , go ahead.

EM - Sike!! i was kidding. no deal

Twitter - NO BACKSIES!!! *sues*

EM - ugh, okay. i will buy this company, but i want full ROI in next 5 years + 50% of you are fired

Twitter - Whaaa!!!

----
i guess some disaster was expected from this takeover and twitter mgmt throwed themselves on the axe on their own.

but it's wierd why every CEO change comes with an immediate firing of staff

Because the new guy has different agenda.

@aviophile exactly, its a power move to install obedient people and make the rest follow due to fear.

Well, Elon is quite excentric and controversial - but he successfully started an electric cars company when no one wanted them and created a successful space company based on recycling rockets which safely return to earth after use. He also manages to provide uninterruptible civil and military communications to Ukraine via Starlink.

He honestly may be the only one who actually could save Twitter.

@Oktokolo didn't he start hating ukraine because they didn't want something he offered?

@killermenpl there are million rich kids like Elon, only a few of them became successful like Elon. So, get rid of your jealous crap.

He backed out after some meetings with execs and some leaks, I wonder what was disclosed he wanted out so badly

EM always struck me as a stoner. Stoner decision was to buy Twitter, regretted doing it irl but now has to try and make the best of it. I'm guessing he's no longer the richest man in the World; 44Bn is a lot even at Bezos/Gates level.

@killermenpl Lol what? Musk got about $30k from his parents to start Zip2, which he later sold for $22M. He then used that money to start x.com, which later merged and became PayPal. Where the fuck did you get that he "bought" PayPal with his parent's money? Also where the fuck do you get that SpaceX funding comes entirely from government grants? This year SpaceX had 16 launches for private firms and 5 for NASA or other government agency. Commercial Crew Program contract actually required SpaceX to match NASA's investment with private funding. In the last 2 years, SpaceX got 4.2 billion from private investors, which is more than NASA gave them for the entire Crew Dragon program since 2016, and also about 50% more than SpaceX will get from NASA for landing on the moon. And they sure as hell didn't get any government grants for Starlink, it's been a whole thing a couple months ago. But how would you know, you can't even check the most basic things before posting total bullshit...

Above all, Elon Musk is an arsehole.

He's an misanthropic arsehole.

... Which is the reason why he's successful.

If you don't give a fuck about human people… it's easy to be successful. Earning profit is easier (!), too.

Rule number 1 of profit: Cut down work force, but smart - make sure your opponents are high priority, so you can do whatever the fuck you want to do.

@hitko 30k from his parents?! Not arguing with any of you guys, it just blows my mind how easy rich kids have it.

@ars1 An average salary in the US at the time was $26k per year, so he got a bit more than that. That's not even close to "rich kids' money", that's the kind of money many pretty average parents save up for their children to help them start their own lives when they grow up. Now "a small loan of $1 million"...

EM had a surprisingly successful strategy in Tesla and SpaceX/Starlink of "dangling shiny keys in front of people's eyes, real hard".
Those are, at the end of the day, engineering companies that make some really incredible shiny pieces. And EM's brand of obnoxious marketing does get people talking about them on the cheap.
Dunno if it is gonna work on Twitter, though. Here the shiny parts are supposed to be as hidden as possible. People don't care about Twitter's message routing flow per GB/s the same way they care about the thrust of a Falcon Heavy per KG/s.
People come to Twitter for the third-party content - it is a marketplace of short ideas and observations. And porn.
Thus, charging "authors" for prime shelf space (the blue mark is no more than that) the same way Wallmart does might end up pushing niche brands away. Looking at you, DevRant.
After all this toil and trouble, I expect a much smaller money pit and way less relevant Twitter.
May the next big thing come.

@alexbrooklyn You likely mean that way out of the eternal proxy war, he suggested to cut costs. Certainly he meant to mainly cut his costs of course. But as a minor side effect, it would have saved thousands of Ukrainians' lives and would have prevented a lot of more suffering too.

That said, don't worry - The use of Starlink in Ukraine is the best advertising Elon could ever get. And when he realized that the Pentagon realized that the war would be over in days without Starlink, he quickly reassured, that he of course won't stop supporting the defense of Ukraine to the last Ukrainian.

In D&D, Elon (or what is seen of him in public) would be true or chaotic neutral. He isn't good or evil - just a Ferengi with some self-control issues (leading to the occasional cringe on Twitter)...

@killermenpl Sure, he started with funding. But that wasn't for PayPal, but his own company (a map-related service of some sort). Also he didn't buy PayPal but cofounded x.com which merged with PayPal and he got rich on the shares he hold when PayPal then was bought by ebay.

And "With $100 million of his own money, Musk founded SpaceX in May 2002 and became the company's CEO and Chief Engineer." Quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (the article links plenty of actual sources). State contracts or not - SpaceX is quite a remarkable milestone in human space travel. And Starlink is impressive too.

I was wrong with Tesla though. He didn't start it - just came in very early and prevented it from dying. Then he basically lead it to success by constantly aquiring new funds and steering it to profitability. Still a pretty good and dramatic business love story...

The way I see it, Twitter got a lot of money from advertisers

Elon forced Twitter to disclose their real user numbers before buying and the percentage of bots was staggeringly high. He disclosed this to the public

Whether or not it was a lie to drive Twitter's price down, Twitter didn't outright claim it was but it made advertisers feel scammed.

Elon gets forced to buy the whole thing at 44B and does so

Advertisers still don't feel like trusting twitter again or pay as much as they did before considering the real user count

Some advertisers are also swayed by the political circus and get talked into not investing in twitter again because Elon proposes to be less left leaning than the previous administration

This means there is less money in Twitter to divide among its people for salary and other stuff, leading to a budget cut, leading to people losing their jobs

...And also apparently Twitter was one of those companies where management hell was a thing. 10 managers for each dev

I really dont understand the hate for Elon, he is a force for good (humor).