Elon Musk Agrees to $44b Deal for Twitter

[44nutman]

Care to give us a timeline regarding the bankruptcy of Twatter?
Less than a year? Will he lose Tesla as well?
Serious question…

I am no financial expert but some dude that posts on a karate forum.
I think Elon will sell Twitter for a loss. Somebody will buy it, but just not for what he paid. Elon is over leveraged right now, so he is not stupid enough to let it completely burn to the ground, and it would be in his best interest to sell at a loss if he cant turn it around in a couple years. He cut his costs which is smart to do with a company that is losing money, but if you cut costs and then lose revenue, the cuts are not as impactful to his bottom line.
Tesla is a different story. His CEO pay is ridiculous, and he is in court for it right now for his pay, because its way too high based on the current CEO pay market. He makes more than the 200 highest paid CEO's combined times 5. Shareholders did not give a shit about that when the stock was mooning, because they made money as well. Now that the stock has been steady dropping, shareholders are like what the fuck dude, how about some of that money go back into the company. His other Tesla problem is fires and wrecks with driver assist is engaged. The tricky part is if he just pays a lot of money for lawyers to make it go away than that is the best-case scenario. Worst case scenario is a recall or some class action suit, combined with the bad publicity of his cars being dangerous which will drive down the sales until that problem is fixed. He borrowed off his Tesla stock to buy Twitter. IF negative information comes out then he still has interest to pay on the money he borrowed, so that could force selling Twitter quicker at a loss.
He may be able to wiggle out it, but being cantankerous and engaging in public wars is not the way to wiggle out of it.
I will give Elon credit for being able to identify emerging tech, bet big on it and won big, but his current strategy with as much as he is leveraged is not a good idea. Now people(me being one of them) will revel in his failures.

 

[chardog]

Unless Elon concedes control of the CEO role and the proceeding CEO doesn’t adhere to his frenetic changes it will undoubtedly fail.

Working at Tesla and having that be the ground up mentality, along with the absurd stock rewards of such a highly profitable and future oriented company, will allow top talent to still be interested in working there.

Twitter has none of that. It wasn’t an engineering powerhouse in the industry to begin with. It certainly will never have tremendous upside with equity compensation and now the publicity is horrendous. Any talent they retain is unlikely to be “top talent” and Elon already fired most of the recruiters.

SO — if you had piss poor recruiters(and so few of them), a horrid public image AND poor total rewards package — you won’t compete for high quality engineers. No amount of overworked underpaid engineers are going to accomplish much there.

The idea of building “the everything app” is novel, but you can’t do it without good talent and Elon will never have that at Twitter.

you probably dont need top level developers for the interface app. The fact is that twitter, the app, already exists, and Tesla's own app, already exists, and they both work reasonably well. Elon has posted the diagram of the software, it's not that complicated.

 

[funcrusher2007]

so basically, he bought a small startup with a market cap of ........ ~100m

to turn it around into a 500B+ market cap company is another story

electric cars have been around since the 90's, to compete with the big 10, it takes a whole new level of comprehension on logistics. Tesla never started off as a self driving car, now it is. Getting a rocket to land on the propulsion side was an idea that existed for decades, Musk solved it, and that alone is a hell of an accomplishment.

Yeah, I totally agree on his edge for seeing future companies worth investing in but I’m addressing the genius/ innovator persona he’s cultivated. He isn’t nikoli Tesla, Charles wright, bill gates or Henry ford.

 

[therealdope]

you probably dont need top level developers for the interface app. The fact is that twitter, the app, already exists, and Tesla's own app, already exists, and they both work reasonably well. Elon has posted the diagram of the software, it's not that complicated.

This. And LMAO at the idea that twitter's code can't be developed OUS.

 

[therealdope]

. He isn’t nikoli Tesla, Charles wright, bill gates or Henry ford.

Bill Gates doesn't belong in that group of names, and Henry Ford is a bit of an odd one too. Bill Gates didn't see any tech coming or introduce anything of real value. His accomplishments (and you could argue they were mostly the result of his father and mother) were licensing deals and coercion of other M$FT employees.

 

[therealdope]

The level of quality is insanely insanely different.

That's almost certainly not true. Our Silly-con valley electronics work is all executed in Asia. Most FPGA code is now written in India.

 

[funcrusher2007]

Bill Gates doesn't belong in that group of names, and Henry Ford is a bit of an odd one too. Bill Gates didn't see any tech coming or introduce anything of real value. His accomplishments (and you could argue they were mostly the result of his father and mother) were licensing deals and coercion of other M$FT employees.

Bill gates did found Microsoft and his own expertise directly contributed to its success and subsequently its domination/staple of modern society. Nobody has refuted that Gates personally reviewed and often rewrote every line of code that the company produced in its first five years. As the company grew, he transitioned into a manager role, then an executive

Henry ford revolutionized production with the assembly line and developed the 5 day/40 hour work week..a staple of modern society.
He didn’t invent the automobile but he did invent the most widely used system of production ever in the history of man..that alone solidified his genius.

 

[MicroBrew]

This is an article from April.

Former Reddit CEO says if Elon Musk takes over Twitter he's 'in for a world of pain' and will be 'forced to censor things' due to difficulty of enforcing free speech.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-reddit-ceo-says-elon-174100143.html?guccounter=1

 

[MicroBrew]

Bill gates did found Microsoft and his own expertise directly contributed to its success and subsequently its domination/staple of modern society. Nobody has refuted that Gates personally reviewed and often rewrote every line of code that the company produced in its first five years. As the company grew, he transitioned into a manager role, then an executive

Henry ford revolutionized production with the assembly line and developed the 5 day/40 hour work week..a staple of modern society.
He didn’t invent the automobile but he did invent the most widely used system of production ever in the history of man..that alone solidified his genius.

When I took a computer class in college, the professor mentioned that Gates ripped of the MS Dos system from some dude he paid a pittance to write.

 

[Via Heeto]

Lovely logic. Kim Kardashian is way richer than you, so surely she knows more about everything than you too, right?

not even in the same universe. she knows more about shooting a porn than i do. But sorry, i think i would trust the richest man in the world who made that money from being a business man over the word of a guy who makes $3250 k a year talking about it on tv.

 

[Rob Battisti]

I mean, FAANG with meta alone wouldn’t be the up and up. I mean tech overall from what that guy was posting. There’s been a lot of mass layoffs in the news this year but it looks like the industry overall is still adding jobs. It does look like some of the larger ones are now expected to become more profitable and their doing cuts as a result. I bet next year could be worse but that other post seems to show the industry still grew their workforce.

This is likely not true and based on job postings. Job postings aren’t 1:1 correlated with actual job openings. Furthermore, it’s feast or famine. The top 10% of tech jobs are going to pay mountains more than the bottom 90%. So there may be engineering jobs at no name companies, but they aren’t necessarily well paying or sought after roles.

you probably dont need top level developers for the interface app. The fact is that twitter, the app, already exists, and Tesla's own app, already exists, and they both work reasonably well. Elon has posted the diagram of the software, it's not that complicated.

I won’t fault you for it, but this is a very ignorant take. Any schmo can develop an interface with JavaScript. To create a robust and reliable platform takes serious engineering and Twitter doesn’t have that. It never really needed it to run its services and to do what Musk wants to do is completely different than what Twitter currently does. He bought it for the user base which is abandoning the platform in droves.

That's almost certainly not true. Our Silly-con valley electronics work is all executed in Asia. Most FPGA code is now written in India.

Absolutely terrible take.

 

[therealdope]

When I took a computer class in college, the professor mentioned that Gates ripped of the MS Dos system from some dude he paid a pittance to write it.

Gary Kildall. They bought QDOS for $25,000 from SCP across the street, which itself copied Kildall's CPM. All M$haft did was change A:\ to C:\

 

[therealdope]

Bill gates did found Microsoft and his own expertise directly contributed to its success and subsequently its domination/staple of modern society. Nobody has refuted that Gates personally reviewed and often rewrote every line of code that the company produced in its first five years. As the company grew, he transitioned into a manager role, then an executive

Henry ford revolutionized production with the assembly line and developed the 5 day/40 hour work week..a staple of modern society.
He didn’t invent the automobile but he did invent the most widely used system of production ever in the history of man..that alone solidified his genius.

That's not true. The earliest employees at M$ all agree that Gates was nit a big contributor to products. His dad was the most powerful lawyer in Seattle and that's how he bamboozled most of the productive people.

Gates wrote a basic interpreter for the Altair 8800 with Paul Allen. After that his next major contribution was writing a snotty letter about sharing software a piracy at the 1977 west coast computer show.

As for DOS that was a stroke of luck because he first sent IBM to Kildall. Unfortunately Kildall's wife was the world's worst IP lawyer and she told UBM to pound salt. Gates and all other early M$haft employees are lucky as shit that Paul Allen had lunch with Tim Patterson of SCP and that Patterson ripped off CP/M

 

[jrams]

That's almost certainly not true. Our Silly-con valley electronics work is all executed in Asia. Most FPGA code is now written in India.

India is still terrible at development. Especially in the past 18 months or so where demand has soared, salaries for entry level has doubled-tripled in much of the southern region, and companies like TCS inflate qualifications.

 

[therealdope]

India is still terrible at development. Especially in the past 18 months or so where demand has soared, salaries for entry level has doubled-tripled in much of the southern region, and companies like TCS inflate qualifications.

Cost in India is not what it was 15 yrs ago. On vendor we work with us in India but another is in Malaysia and Pakistan. It's a big world and there are competent workers outside of the US.

 

[Rob Battisti]

Cost in India is not what it was 15 yrs ago. On vendor we work with us in India but another is in Malaysia and Pakistan. It's a big world and there are competent workers outside of the US.

Not for this kind of work. You highlighted hardware engineering which can be offloaded because it’s system architecture is done stateside. It’s not even remotely close to the same ballpark as to what is needed to handle Twitter and turn it around.

 

[jrams]

Not for this kind of work. You highlighted hardware engineering which can be offloaded because it’s system architecture is done stateside. It’s not even remotely close to the same ballpark as to what is needed to handle Twitter and turn it around.

It's inevitable at this point to get an army of coders from India, China, or Brazil for any MNC. The architectural stuff is almost never in India though. The talent just isn't there.

I couldn't imagine anyone in India suggesting:

1. Twitter look for an alternative to Ruby
2. Twitter taking that person seriously
3. Twitter trusting them to switch to a fledgeling language like Scala

 

[Rob Battisti]

It's inevitable at this point to get an army of coders from India, China, or Brazil for any MNC. The architectural stuff is almost never in India though. The talent just isn't there.

I couldn't imagine anyone in India suggesting:

1. Twitter look for an alternative to Ruby
2. Twitter taking that person seriously
3. Twitter trusting them to switch to a fledgeling language like Scala

Which is precisely my point. Offshore engineers have their place, but it’s definitely not as the main body of your engineering staff.

 

[Pride23]

Dude, everybody except for Muskrats are saying he's running twitter into the ground. The only thing they can't agree on is whether he is doing it on purpose or not.
I fleshed out my arguments in previous posts and nobody, including you, have addressed any of them. All you say is "he's rich therefore he knows what he's doing"
Being rich didn't stop Donald Trump from bankrupting his casinos. Past successes don't guarantee future success because that is called the hot hand fallacy (something I mentioned earlier).

I am not responding again after this because I honestly don't care enough, you probably have your mind set and I do as well, but I will address this post.

I don't know what your arguments are prior to this post, I haven't seen any.

I have never said "he's rich therefore he knows what he's doing"

I have said he is best in class at running a company, just look at what Tesla and Space X have become.

Past successes do not guarantee future success, this is true but if you were going to wager on someone not being successful, maybe choose someone whom hasn't built some of the most impressive companies on the planet and maybe don't judge the trajectory of his new endeavor based on what the MSM is saying and literally the first weeks he took over said new endeavor when prior to him taking over this endeavor, the company had be stagnant for many years.

The hot hand fallacy has literally nothing to do with this. He is best in class when running a company, it has nothing to do with a streak.

The comparison would be saying Michael Jordan after winning 2 championships in a row, doesn't know what he is doing playing basketball.

 

[jrams]

Which is precisely my point. Offshore engineers have their place, but it’s definitely not as the main body of your engineering staff.

I was agreeing with you.

I disagree with your earlier statement that Twitter didn't need high level engineers to run its service. The stuff they've done with Go and Scala needs real deep understanding for scalability. Just like Microsoft pushing up against the edge of github repos; it's all easy and straightforward until you get to the scale that Twitter and Microsoft are hitting.